A First Course in Electrical Engineering

This article describes the introductory two-semester course in electrical engineering that has been developed over a period of five years at Princeton University. The aims of the course are to provide an introduction to the field of electrical engineering via the basic concepts of electricity and magnetism (which are developed through Maxwell's equations in the integral form), to apply these concepts in developing the fundamentals of energy conversion and circuit theory, and to carry forward, in a continuous and integrated way, a modern treatment of network analysis. Thus, the treatment proceeds from field ideas to circuits and physical apparatus, and to their mathematical models. With the circuit relations formulated, attention turns to the analysis of networks, starting with network topology and extending through pole-zero ideas. The treatment stops just short of the Laplace transform. This course is intended to serve as a foundation for subsequent courses such as electronic circuits, energy conversion, and advanced network analysis and synthesis, and has been developed with the purpose of providing the student with a unifying point of view for these varied topics.