Synopsis
Most programming textbooks teach you to code. This one teaches you to code like an electrical engineer.
Programming for Electrical Engineers: MATLAB and Spice was built for students who need to solve real circuit problems, not generic exercises borrowed from a computer science course. Every example comes from electrical and computer engineering — mesh and nodal analysis, Fourier transforms, phasor analysis, signal processing, filter design. You learn MATLAB the way you'll actually use it: as a tool for the problems already on your problem sets.
The book pairs MATLAB fundamentals with a dedicated chapter on circuit simulation in Spice, so you finish the course fluent in both. It also builds in the professional-practice material ABET reviewers look for — engineering ethics, professional development, lifelong learning — as part of the coursework, not an appendix.
Written by James C. Squire, P.E., Ph.D. (Virginia Military Institute) and Julie Phillips Brown, Ph.D., and refined over two decades of teaching students who arrive with zero programming background.
If you're teaching or taking an intro programming course inside an ECE curriculum, this is the textbook built for that exact course — not adapted from a different one.
About the Author
James C. Squire, P.E., Ph.D., is the Jamison-Payne Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Virginia Military Institute, where he has taught circuits, programming, and signal processing since 2000. He is the first professor in Virginia's history selected twice for the State Council of Higher Education's Outstanding Faculty Award — Rising Star in 2004, and again in 2025 — and holds VMI's Distinguished Teaching Award.
Before academia, Squire graduated from West Point in 1989 and served as a military intelligence officer in the Persian Gulf War, earning a Bronze Star. He completed his doctorate at MIT, where he taught, consulted in patent litigation, and conducted biomedical engineering research. He holds 8 patents, with one pending, and has co-founded three technology startups: MATTS LLC, Tick Rover LLC, and VMIne LLC.
Co-author Julie Phillips Brown, Ph.D., brought two decades of classroom testing to the book's structure and pacing, shaping it into a course that students with no programming background can follow start to finish.
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