ISBN0131499300

I found lots of answers to practical situations encountered in electro-mech. systems. If you are working with signals, this book gives you good advice in general, and sufficient theory background to back it up. It is well written and has lots of plots - uses Matlab.

It is a good textbook about feedback control design. A lot of examples from the engineering world are useful for undergraduate students. It well written and easy to read.

Beware of the International Version it is not the exact same as the Hardcover version just with a softcover. There are less problems, and problems are numbered differently. Those are the only differences found so far, as of two weeks into the semester of an advanced controls course.

Vague, poor/loose structure, plenty of discussion but fails to teach. The material is at a high level (senior or above), but that's not my quibble with this book. There are excellent alternatives though on control systems, most notably Norman Nise (currently in 5th ed.) and Ogata. (My bacground is in ME and EE, master's level.)

The Good:
This text does hit on most of the topics in controls. It's manageable if you have a good instructor.

Wide breadth.

The Bad:
The writing seems to go out of its way to be unnecessarily cryptic. It performs variable changes every chance it gets, skips steps in the examples (which are light in and of themselves). The figures in the last sections link back to the first. If you find yourself saddled with a hard-to-understand instructor (foreign-language Ph.D students come to mind), get the exercises from someone else and pick up Ogata's Modern Control Engineering (I literally understood Root-Locus more from twenty minutes of reading Ogata than two hours of wrestling with this text).

Poor depth. Avoid.

A note: You WILL require MATLAB. Don't try this material without it.