Fundamentals of Applied Electromagnetics (5th Edition) [Hardcover]

Electromagnetics book

The lightest textbook in my backpack, but certainly not the emptiest. This high information-density volume contains a wealth of knowledge, examples, and fairly readable text about the subject - and the CD is actually helpful!

At the beginning of the semester I had no idea what material the electromagnetics class consisted of, but now at the end I can look back and see a large number of topics presented in a fairly logical progression. The book's modus operandi is: teach/review the underlying math concept, then use that math to tackle an electromagnetics problem. I enjoyed this approach a lot, though I agree with my professor that the order of presentation is a little questionable. We shuffled between chapters 3 and 4 so as not to dwell on pure math as much and instead deal with physical, practical problems. For example, instead of learning both divergence and curl simultaneously, we first learned divergence and then used it solve some problems involving Electric fields. Then we went back, learned curl, and applied it to different problems.

I was overwhelmed with the sheer variety of topics covered in this course. There seemed to be too many ways to do problems, and I couldn't get a good feel for when to use which method. The book's examples and explanations helped for homework sets, but come test time I usually knew three ways to solve it but wasn't sure which way would produce the proper result. In an hour testing situation, I don't have time to try out all three ways on every problem!

There must be a way to teach these concepts in a more targeted method, but I don't know how. I feel I have a good knowledge of the material from the book, though, and the CD's examples were very good. The CD showed step-by-step work for problems from the text, and had its own examples not in the book that did a good job demonstrating a concept. Don't throw away the CD!

The svelte size of this book impresses me, because it shows the author cared enough to trim his wordage to a reasonable level. This should keep students happy, both in their backpacks and their studying.

The text is difficult to follow. The short-range organization is quite good, but the long-range organization is weak. Go to the next page and you will likely have a hard time figuring out how the material there relates to what you were just reading. Many good lectures use this kind of structure, but I find that it does not make a good textbook.

The text lacks coherent derivations. Ulaby just throws equations at you without linking them together strongly. For instance, the input impedance of a transmission line with an arbitrary load (arguably the most important relation in the entire chapter on transmission lines) is derived piecemeal over the course of several sections. The derivation really isn't hard, though - it could easily have been done in two pages. Ulaby does put nice blue boxes around the particularly important equations, but that doesn't help much.

I found the treatment too simple for an upper-division course. Ulaby "misses the forest for the trees" by dwelling on details that should be simple to an upper-division engineering student.

Fundamentals of Applied Electromagnetics (5th Edition)
The author of this book currently teaches at in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at my University (Univeristy of Michigan -- Ann Arbor), which is surely one reason why the book is used in the electromagnetics courses (200-400 level undergraduate) here. Like other reviewers have mentioned, the book does contain a lot of useful formulas, however it only derives a few of them. Furthermore, from reading this book, I did not gain any intuitive understanding of most of the fundamental concepts of electromagnetics (which is probably my single largest criticism of the book). Instead, I got through my courses by searching for the right formulas for a given problem, which I hate doing. I've heard other students at my school rave about this book, but I wouldn't purchase it again.