Essential Mathcad for Engineering, Science, and Math, Second Edition 2nd Edition

Returning to school, I quickly realized I had to not only remember material I'd learned years ago, but I needed to learn or re-learn a number of programs to help complete my work. Mathcad is one of those programs. I searched our university library for helpful reference books but came up short: some were out of date, others were poorly written, still others focused on using the program for a specific field.Brent Maxfield has produced a book that is very helpful. It's written clearly and is general enough to help people from a variety of disciplines but isn't so general that it's useless. I had already tried to learn Mathcad on my own so was familiar with the basics. Because of this, I didn't use this book to teach me how to use the program. Instead, it serves as a ready reference beside my computer as I work. I've used this book for about six months now and have yet to look to it for something that it does not contain. The organization of the book is intuitive ... unlike some features in Mathcad. The index is comprehensive making what I'm looking for easy to find ... unlike the help files in Mathcad. His combination of explanation and examples make it very easy to implement what I'm trying to do.In short, I was about to cast aside Mathcad as too time consuming to learn while in the midst of academic endeavors when I discovered this book. Thanks to Brent Maxfield, I can use the powerful nature of Mathcad to help me learn and understand the engineering material rather than spending excessive time learning the software itself.

I bought this product because I am taking a graduate class in unsaturated soil mechanics and the professor asked us to submit our HW using mathematical software. Mathcad is his software of choice. I found the first edition of Maxfield's book in the university library and thought it somewhat helpful. When I found this new edition was available, I ordered it to have a copy for myself.This update makes the book far more useful than the first edition because of the great increase in the number of example problems. It has helped me turn Mathcad into a tool by putting a context on how the program works and behaves. For me, this is important because while the program help files are useful, many of the error messages are of the "I found the problem, now it's your turn!" variety and using this book has helped me identify the problems. I anticipate using Mathcad and this book for some time to come and while I still have a few problems with some of the quirks of the program itself, I have been able to overcome most of them by reading the book. As I expand my use of the more advanced features of the program, I will be consulting this book before I use each new feature.This book has been a great help because of its organization. It is organized into an introductory section, basic tools, advanced tools and organizing calculations. As I am still learning Mathcad, I still find it most useful that when I have a question to first check the intro section, then go to the more advanced sections. My only complaint about this book is a rather skimpy index.All in all, a well-written book and I would recommend it.

Several years ago I used the first edition of this book to help train a group of about 20 newly-hired technical staff with recently-received B.S. degrees in areas ranging from physics, mechanical, chemical, materials, electrical, and controls. We used Mathcad tutorials, on-line PTC help desk, and two text books including this one by Brent Maxfield. I recently purchased the 2nd edition of this book and think it is a significantly improved reference text that is useful for newcomers and experienced users of Mathcad to learn or refresh their skills.

This is a great book! It's very well written and offers great explanations and plenty of great examples to help you get started, and comfortable with using Mathcad. As previously stated in another review, the book includes an academic license of Mathcad 14 which I installed without issue. In fact I have not experienced any problems whatsoever with the print preview function, and I've used the software on my own machine (windows 7 pro, with windows update print drivers) as well as a few of the computers on campus (custom built win7 machines).

This book gives very detailed info on the features in Mathcad 14. I found the book to be extremely useful. The CD gives you a full working Academic version of Mathcad 14. As a previous reviewer said, the Print Preview button doesn't work, but that isn't much of a problem, since this is a WYSIWYG program. Unlike the previous reviewer, I found that you can print the worksheet, so long as you want to print it directly, without using the print preview first.It's an awesome book and CD for an awesome program.

No issues with the text. It is well organized, well written and an easy read. My issue is with the software. I cannot get it to load onto my computer. It takes a half-hour or longer to show any progress before I get an error message re: file MathCAD\rc\program files\MathSoft\MathCAD 14\Handbook\improc\anat45.pgm. A second error message pops up later saying ERROR 1722.Running XP PRO. Disabled virus scan and firewall. No luck. Unfortunately, can't take full advantage of the book without the software.

This book is a must-have for anyone starting with MathCad, or even for regular users who aren't necessarily expert programmers. It's well laid out, making for easy reference.