Modern Control Systems (10th Edition)

Rating:
Summary: This could be a much better book
Review: I have several concrete complaints about this book, as I am currently taking a controls course. This book suffers from too much fluff. There are tons of pretty pictures and examples, but they lack in substance. Critical rules, definitions, and formulas that are referred to are often not clearly stated by themselves, but are placed in examples. Notation on graphs is oftentimes completely ambiguous. Not only are the actual methods difficult or impossible to find, but the index itself is pathetic. The definition of a laplace transform is located in the index, but the actual table itself is not referenced in the index. Later on, the book refers to something called the "phase critereon," but one look into the index will lead nowhere as to what this critereon is.

Speaking of the laplace table, it is incomplete. I have a much more thorough table in another book, which I have to reference in order to do some transforms that were in this book's problem set. If the table is not going to be complete and usable, why even bother including it?

Another example of a nonexisting rule is the angle critereon. If it actually exists, I cannot find it. Let me explain. To find the departure angle in a root locus plot, you need to know the angle from each pole and zero to the pole or zero that you are departing/arriving to (the book never states it this way though, it speaks of angles, but what angles you are left to figure out). In some cases, the sign of the angles will be negative, in others positive, but in which cases you are left to guess, because the book never states the method explicitly. Sure, it uses the method in the examples (in the form of 1. you are given this 2. we take a step that we never explain 3. here is the result), but in such cases it was impossible for me to figure out what exactly the rules were.

All in all, this book is a bear to learn from. The one saving grace is the extensive time spent on the application of Matlab. I begin to wonder, however, if by spending so much time on Matlab the author is slighting the reader. Sure, any monkey can run a Matlab rlocus() function; however, if they never got a solid base in plotting it by hand, sooner or later they will come upon something that needs a higher understanding--they will be completely unprepared.