Spreadsheet Tools for Engineers Using Excel or The Elements of Computing Systems

Spreadsheet Tools for Engineers using Excel

Author: Byron S Gottfried

Through previous editions, this practical text has found a permanent spot in many introductory engineering courses by successfully combining an introduction to Excel fundamentals with a clear presentation on how Excel can be used to solve common engineering problems. Updated to ensure compatability with all recent versions of Excel, this third edition of Spreadsheet Tools for Engineers provides beginning engineering students with a strong foundation in problem solving using Excel as the modern day equivalent of the slide rule.

As part of McGraw-Hill's BEST series for freshman engineering curricula, this text is particularly geared toward introductory students. The author provides plenty of background information on technical terms, and numerous examples illustrating both traditional and spreadsheet solutions for a variety of engineering problems. The first three chapters introduce the basics of problem solving and Excel fundamentals. Beyond that, the chapters are largely independent of one another. Topics covered include graphing data, converting units, analyzing data, interpolation and curve fitting, solving equations, evaluating integrals, writing macros, and comparing economic alternatives.

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The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles

Author: Noam Nisan

In the early days of computer science, the interactions of hardware, software, compilers, and operating system were simple enough to allow students to see an overall picture of how computers worked. With the increasing complexity of computer technology and the resulting specialization of knowledge, such clarity is often lost. Unlike other texts that cover only one aspect of the field, The Elements of Computing Systems gives students an integrated and rigorous picture of applied computer science, as its comes to play in the construction of a simple yet powerful computer system.

Indeed, the best way to understand how computers work is to build one from scratch, and this textbook leads students through twelve chapters and projects that gradually build a basic hardware platform and a modern software hierarchy from the ground up. In the process, the students gain hands-on knowledge of hardware architecture, operating systems, programming languages, compilers, data structures, algorithms, and software engineering. Using this constructive approach, the book exposes a significant body of computer science knowledge and demonstrates how theoretical and applied techniques taught in other courses fit into the overall picture.

Designed to support one- or two-semester courses, the book is based on an abstraction-implementation paradigm; each chapter presents a key hardware or software abstraction, a proposed implementation that makes it concrete, and an actual project. The emerging computer system can be built by following the chapters, although this is only one option, since the projects are self-contained and can be done or skipped in any order. All the computer scienceknowledge necessary for completing the projects is embedded in the book, the only pre-requisite being a programming experience.

The book's web site provides all tools and materials necessary to build all the hardware and software systems described in the text, including two hundred test programs for the twelve projects. The projects and systems can be modified to meet various teaching needs, and all the supplied software is open-source.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction : hello, world below	1
1	Boolean logic	7
2	Boolean arithmetic	29
3	Sequential logic	41
4	Machine language	57
5	Computer architecture	79
6	Assembler	103
7	Virtual machine I : stack arithmetic	121
8	Virtual machine II : program control	153
9	High-level language	173
10	Compiler I : syntax analysis	199
11	Compiler II : code generation	223
12	Operating system	247
13	Postscript : more fun to go	277