Feedback-Systems

I am a graduate EE student. I thought that this book could be helpful in Control Systems course but it was a real pain to go through the book. The examples are not clear and too much theoretical. There is only one thing to say about this book, it is not for Electrical Engineers.

I strongly recommend this book to graduate students who are studying in the control field. It has very good examples and concise explanation of the subject. As I see, it is an alternative approach in the frequency domain.

This is a companion to "Modern Control Systems" by Dorf & Bishop. Much of the text of this book refers back to the "parent" text, and as such some sections of this text seem somewhat "incomplete". Easy to read, good as a stand-alone review of control systems. Not much on "modern control" (most of the book covers classical control). Not a whole lot of Simulink content, mainly Matlab functions used for specific topics. Good example systems.

The book contains valuable examples for classical control of SISO systems. Topics covered even include digital control and robust control.

kids.... i think you know what i mean.

This is a good text book for someone who wants to learn system/control theory. It is not a good reference for experienced engineers.

As is usually the case with Prentice Hall books, you are left puzzled about how to use the information presented in the chapter to solve even the first Practice Problem in each chapter. The chapter uses simple examples, and then expects you to solve more complicated systems without explaining how the concepts can be extended to cover them.

The authors also provide no answers to the practice problems, so to check any of your work you must find someone that knows the correct answer and compare your work with theirs.

It seems every time the author attempts to extend some help by preworking part of a problem they make a typo... With only one simple example as guidance there is no room for typos.

On the plus side, the material in the book is well selected. If you are working on control systems, you will find these topics helpful, so the book does deserve a star, but only one.

I do not recommend this book or its publisher, Prentice Hall; especially to anyone trying to independent study this material.

Why are there no solutions to the presented problems? Most all books I have used, in my 3 years of studying EE, have had the answers to the odd numbered problems. One example within a chapter is not enough for a student to be certain that other, more different, problems can be aproached and solved in the same manner.

If a solutions guide is available, I am more than willing to purchase it. suckomj@yahoo.com

Control systems are a difficult subject to cover, but this book does a good job of bringing the novice reader up to speed. This is a very straightforward treatment of an extremely technical field, and while it could hardly be described as gripping reading, Phillips has done a good job of presenting the main concepts clearly and understandably. The book is nicely divided into self-contained sections, allowing undergraduate students to immediately identify those topics relevant to their course. Probably the most useful textbook available to the undergraduate control student.

ok, after being with this book for 5 weeks. NOW, I have to say something about this book. I am now doing my homework and I have to read this book to do it, but in those examples, I dont' see much steps, all I see are "sudden jumps". Cmon, give me a break.. show me the steps... I do not want to spend hours on finding out what the missing steps are. If you are a beginner and dont' know much about feedback, DO NOT buy this book or you will have a hard time. Also, the way this book interprets the problems is not easy to understand either.

Almost every subject worthy of a textbook already has 1-3 classic titles all new students should read and use. For feedback and control systems, there's Ogata's Modern Control Engineering - and then there are second-rate, tree-killing (where are Ents when you want 'em?), mind-numbing, hair-tearing, expletive-inducing texts like this one. And no, swearing in French while trying to work through a problem doesn't make it more enjoyable either. First, this book is poorly written - long, tiresome, dry writing that lulls you to sleep. Second, there are errors strewn throughout, which because of the lackluster writing you'll initially miss (example, page 221, Ziegler-Nichols tuning, equation 4.52 and fig. 4.13 - mistakes in parameter names can drive you nuts until you read Ogata's clear and concise version). Third, the trivial example problems are little help in solving the harder problems, causing you to rapidly awaken from your reading stupor into frustration and mild terror as you discover the aforementioned errors. At that point, drop this book, reach for Ogata and/or the Schaum's Outline, and discover that introductory controls can make sense and even be elegant. As an aside, I did well in controls with no real EE background, but that's despite this book - praise be unto Ogata. Professors, please ignore the pretty cover and skip this expensive waste of paper, and use Ogata - your students will learn more effectively and may even continue further in the subject.

The problem with this book is it has a lot of content, tries to explain just about everything there is in controls and does not care to explain out the details ... its pretty tough if are do-it-yourself kind... But many of the things in this book are not in other books (or are better explained in advanced control books). It literally took out my interst in Controls. Certainly not a book for beginners.

The best recommendation to the writers of textbooks is "Step into reader's shoes." Writer is an expert of the subject. He knows the subject very well. Readers are not. Readers need enough guide to follow what is written in the book. This book often jumps into a conclusion without enough intermediate steps. Equations come out of blue. I was perplexed by that the writing is sparse and crude. Thus I stopped reading this book and returned.

The manner this book is written is not very professional. It neither explains why the formulas shown are correct, what each formula means, and how to use them in control implementation. This book may be useful only for those who studied this subject with other books and only need a formula sheet. Another problem of this book is typos. The author is recommended to have more teaching experiences and learn how to explain the subject. The publisher is recommended to inspect typos before the next edition will be in print.

am still at the begining, so far it's good and easy...

If you want to learn about Modern Control Systems the first time around then use a book written by Ogata, Kuo or Nise. These three authors have some of the best books on this subject that you will ever see.

As for this book
GOOD:
The Matlab part of the book I would give 4 stars. It is pretty good and lets you get acquainted with the control toolbox. There are a wide variety of problems in the book and it has a lot of design problems for the reader. Problems include exercise problems, regular problems (beats me why he didn't put them together), advance problems and Matlab Problems. If you already know the subject then it could possibly be a good design book.

BAD:
Worst book I have ever read. This book offers some of the worst explanations I have ever seen in a book. It is nearly impossible to do the problems with the information given to you. Reading the book is like solving an exercise problem in itself. A lot of times the math is skipped so you have no idea how he got to the answer. While other books happened to spend 4 pages on a topic, Dorf managed to compress it into a useless paragraph. Also, Dorf expects you to clairvoyantly know what a definition is. When reading through a chapter he talks about something without telling you what it is. Somehow he expected you to know that at the end of the chapter, AFTER you've read everything he'll give you a definition list. Very few exercise problems have answers to them so if you are doing something wrong then you will not know. If you are looking for self-study from this book then start crying now because you will throw over 100 bucks in the garbage.

The most definitively annoying thing about the book is how it references other books. Dorf commonly gives you a sentence on a topic and then references the sentence to another book. Those sentences are meaningless and explain nothing, which gave me the impression that I was supposed to go to one of the hundreds of referenced books to learn what he was talking about.

IN SUM:
The only people who will like this book are the ones who already know the subject. I found that after I read Modern Control Engineering by Ogata and understood the subject, I appreciated a FEW of the examples Dorf gave, even though I could find a slew of books that could cover that material better. If you are a teacher looking to make this your class's book, reconsider because your students will not learn the subject.

Not once in all my university courses have I had a text that is this frustrating. It presents results without justification, it uses examples with no explanation, it weighs a ton and yet refers you to their website on every other page because the necessary material isn't even included in the book. If you have a university/college course that requires this text PLEASE do your whole campus a favor and tell the prof. to change to something else.

I am a practicing systems engineer in industry. My company, Transpower Corporation, writes custom and commercial engineering and accounting software. Over the years I've purchased many, many control engineering books, including the fourth and seventh editions of Prof. Dorf's Modern Control Systems. At my request, Dr. Dorf sent me the solutions manual. Unlike the other reviewers here, I find the book to be easy reading, particularly because of the many fine illustrations which add immensely to the clarity of presentation. The 800 problems contained in the book cover a very wide range of modern real-life control systems; they are vastly better than the problems contained in any other control book I've purchased.

The book is very strong on classical methods, but rather weak on the so-called "modern methods." I happen to prefer the Internal Model Principle and even wrote a software package, Optimal Control Designer, to make that method easy to apply. Unfortunately Dorf treats the Internal Model Principle only briefly. The same goes for LQR and other optimization methods. On the other hand, ITAE and deadbeat systems are treated rather well.

The use of MATLAB in the book and problems is very welcome. However, Simulink is not used. Those of us in industry are likely to use Simulink to simulate a proposed system to death before production. Hopefully the forthcoming 10th edition will include example applications using Simulink.

One other deficiency is the lack of treatment of real-time computer control (for example using Real-Time Workshop and Real-Time Windows Target). I haven't yet found any text on control which goes into any detail on this subject--those of us in industry would very much like such a text.

In summary I highly recommend this book. It's worth the price just for the spectacular set of end-of-chapter problems.

Before you buy, you should know that this publication is only 10 pages long, and aside from giving some general information about why and why not to use the 360 degree evaluation system, never actually provides good advice on how to construct a program.