This interesting article addresses some of the key issues regarding getting to know more about engineering textbook such as how they are written and general type of their structure. A careful reading of this article could make a big difference in how you think about engineering textbook and particularly useful for you if you are the one that looking for an engineering textbook for your study. Once you begin to move beyond basic background information of it, you begin to realize that there's more interesting aspects of engineering textbook that maybe useful for you than you may have first thought.

In general, there are two broad types of engineering textbooks in terms of content and writing structure. The first one I rather call it curriculum-focused which highly aims to write about what engineering students want for their studies to complete a qualification. Therefore the content inside seem not deviates even a bit from the scope of the content or exactly on what the study courses are outline. The second one is, of course, what I called not 100% curriculum-focused. They were normally written by authors who think that their books should have more content than what student's need to complete study. They need some kind of information that help them when they go to outside world and compete with their competitors in other states in the open job market.

So the information authors gave inside the book may be some kind of true experience and learning point from real working environment that they would like to give point of view to readers. However, there is a third type of engineering textbook that I also want to mention about, which is the completely tailor-made for preparing the students merely for the university exam. This kind of textbooks is what kind of highly specific for only one group of students, so content may be full of detail and notes and guide lines in there. To this type of book, they are generally recommended by teachers themselves or the university for first year students who want to pass the exam. In my personal feeling, it is quite contradict that engineering textbook for students should have comprehensive content detail as well as exposure to the illustrative features of technical engineering vocabularies, but these kind of ?book for examination? is only a kind of tools which only to present material, which will help students prepare for the examination and writers seem to have no concern about it.

As a result, when a university tend to promote or lecturers recommend this kind of books to students in stead of prescribing them, there will be abundant of ?exam-focused? engineering text books. And the authors of these book have done something so wrong, in my opinion, as many of concrete knowledge has been deviated into completely wrong concept of grammar the identification of grammatical categories like object, complement, etc., along with plenty of ungrammatical expressions. Therefore, for you as a student, it is your own judgement to the right type of engineering textbook that most suit to your needs and do not be overwhelm by those which make you become confused.

Hopefully the sections above have contributed to your understanding of engineering textbook. And do not forget to share your new understanding about engineering textbook with others students and they'll thank you for it.

Tatiya T.