i was planning 2 go 2 the university in sydney next year, taking engineering. but u see that, my english sux. im worried that i wont understand a word in uni textbook, cos textbook language is harder 2 understand. and im seriously thinking of killing myself if i failed. can u recomend an engineering book 4 me? just a basic one, a warm-up to uni, cos im on 11 grade. and at least available in australia. thx guyz!
I don't know about specific books. However when I did electrical and electronic engineering at the technical college starting when I was your age the text books we used were written in reasonably clear English. Obviously technical terms and descriptions can get a bit difficult to follow even for English speakers, but I don't think you'll have too many problems with the English generally. If you are doing electronics rather than electrical, then "The Art of Linear Electronics" by John Linsley Hood and "The Art of Electronics" by Paul Horowitz are good. However they both date from the 1980s so the content could be outdated for what you'd be learning. They are also both seriously expensive, even bought used on eBay. Do you have any decent bookstores there, where you can have a look at some of the possible books, open them at random pages and read bits to see if it is clearly worded or not? Check the customer reviews on Amazon too. Also, can you get hold of any Indonesian books on the subject? Do you have family there that could sent you some? If you can get books in your native language then you'll just be trying to understand the information, not the information AND the language.
You could practice your english, Im sure if you read a paragraph or two of good english a night, you'll notice an improvement Also, try typing all english words fully like I am doing here. It'll help you grasp some of the words better If you want to know a few books to read to help your English, PM me and i'll have a look around for you Good luck! /Ty
Don't worry; even English speakers end up learning a new language in engineering. "Describe the moment about point x due to a 527N Force perpendicular to point y" doesn't make sense to anyone at first. But anyways...there's a LOT of math, which probably wouldn't be too harsh, and I'm sure there's various clubs on your campus that could help students like yourself. When I was in engineering (in Canada, mind you) I noticed there was actually a very large number of English-as-a-second-language students. Also, you will learn the Greek alphabet within a month. That's always a plus, right?
I'm in an Electrical Engineering program, and like Paul mentioned, the engineering text books don't have super tough English in them. In my program there are many international students for whom English is a second language, and they have a harder time in the English / humanities courses than the actual Engineering ones. As far as textbooks go, the most important thing in Engineering is to have a solid math background. The first is Calculus. I've found the Calculus books by James Stewart to be reasonably good. It covered both single variable and multivariable (vector) calculus. It also touched on differential equations, which is used a lot. For differential equations, learning concepts of DE, as well as Laplace and Fourier transforms is important for higher level Engineering courses. Linear Algebra is another required Math. My textbook for Linear and DE was quite poor, but I found this site which has free Calculus, DE, and Linear course notes. I've only used the DE notes, but I found them quite good and almost as good as a book. Plus of course they're free: http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/ As far as actual Engineering courses, for circuits I used the book "Electric Circuits" by Nilsson and Riedel. It helped clarify some topics that my professor didn't explain very well. Some like the book others don't. I had a link to other free online Circuits stuff which I'll have to try and find. The book Microelectronic Circuits by Sedra / Smith was the book I used for electronics courses (dealing with Transistors, etc). I found it a pretty good book but very expensive. These topics aren't exactly light reading and it requires a very motivated individual to learn them on their own. It's not so much the English used, just the technical depth of the material.
