Schaum's Outline of Feedback and Control Systems, Second Edition

Control Systems texts can cost more than $100. Schaum's Outline provides a lot for the price. It makes me want to look into other titles by Schaum's.

The book is good. It covers most Control sys concepts. However, the chapters on Nyquist, Bode, and Root Locus are a little convoluded. I have yet to find a Control Sys. book that covers these concepts well. Otherwise, a great reference for those taking a course, and contains a good number of workable problems and solutions.

This is one of my favorite books. Once you have the basic theory behind you this book shows you the techniques to quickly simplify control blocks ( You want to be able to solve questions more than one way to check yourself) . I just keep this book handy and have alots of added notes for specific control models. It helps round out other books in the end i found this book by itself with some photo copies from other texts was enough for me. There are alot good text books for control theory. I prefer ones with matlab / simulink exercises. The text Ogata is a famous quality standard univeristy text worldwide which has plenty of exercise/ solutions.( I like that style of text).

I'm currently taking a Feedback Control Theory course at the undergrad level, and I think this book is an excellent exposition of classical control theory. Our text for the course is Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems, written by people from Stanford. Schaum's Outline actually has more *theory* than the textbook we are using. It eliminates all of the frills and pretty colored diagrams in favor of exposing everything an undergraduate would have trouble with. And for those people who think the emphasis is only on problem solving, this "Outline" has more mathematical proof than the book from Stanford I just mentioned! I highly recommend using this book to get off on the right foot in control systems, whether you are an engineer just learning the material or an undergraduate; it solidifies the foundations of the theory so that practical problems will come more easily. Also, it is a practical book as well.

I only bought this book after I went through undegraduate control and digital control classes. And after getting very fragmented knowledge of these disciplines, this book was very good in helping me sort it out. Yes, if you don't know a thing about control theory or don't have basic math background, it probably is hard to grasp without any other sourses. But if you have some basic understanding of the subject, then it is a very good review and reference for the classical control theory. I used this book for review before taking a PhD preliminary exam in controls, and it helped a lot. Now I am using it for the same reason for the job I just started. I like the way it describes digital control theory in parallel with the continuous-time controls, which is the best way to understand the discrete-time tools, instead of taking a whole other class starting from scratch. Constant examples to illustrate the theory are very good, so are the excersises. Mind you, this book doesn't go into details like some 800pp. volumes but it doesn't leave out anything important either. I highly recommend this book to undegrad and grad students, as well as a reference for the engineers.