ISBN0130609072

This text is not just thorough in its covered material. It covers more material than all other undergrad. level control texts I've ever seen. It treats thoroughly both state-space and the transform approaches which makes this text somehow unique. The text opens your eyes to the P,PI,PD and PID controllers in the very beginning which is thrilling for first time control students. As a matter of fact, the text is more focused on mechanical engineers interests than those of the electrical engineers. I consider the concept itself neutral :) which ECS/EE majors might share with ME(s).

As a student you will find the text written in a way that it walks through the concept and practice with you step by step. It teaches you matlab the same way (step by step!). If you are using another text through this course you may use this one as a supplementary text since it covers almost every topic used through the undergraduate level. The multi input multi output system is covered in every control systems text except the fact that none of those I read (more than 5 'big' texts) stated how would you evaluate the values of betas in the B matrix!. Yes, that was no big deal! :) but for me, I always appreciate to see how/where did you get it more than how does the final form look like!

As an undergraduate student I would say, you can either use another text and consult this one just in case! or you can get this one and save the other text's money !

This book helped me a lot while I was studing Control Theory at college. It has very clear examples and it is well written.

A true introductory book on Control Engineering

I love this book. The book is written in a very clear and readable way. All topics explanations are simple to understand. All examples are shown step by step, so you can really understand the ideas and applications associated with each one.

Katsuhiko Ogata's book is unbeatable as an introductory textbook for Control Systems at the undergraduate level. This was my text book in college, so I can recommend it base on my first hand learning experience.

Great book but lacks application problems. I am told this book is more for an indepth analysis of topics already learned from other coureses with the addition of Observers,state observer feedback, Intro to the use of Kalman filters, state variable feedback, and optimization. The optimization section could be better but if you have a great teacher its a good reference. I had used this book as an undergrad and told its a reference for grad students.

As a student taking a class taught by this text, I can confirm that this book is one of the most poorly written textbooks I have ever used. I suppose I wouldn't feel qualified to comment if I hadn't received the only A in the class on our last midterm. The author does not define his jargon adequately and does not list important vocabulary items in the index; thus the reader cannot find definitions in the text without riffling through every page. The examples are not just plentiful, they're the only thing in there. Except for the ambiguous prefaces on every chapter, there are very few explanations of the motivation for anything, which leaves the students in the class asking "open loop or closed-loop transfer function?" several times in the chapter on frequency response. It's true some pages contain a step-by-step process of what to do, but many times the idioms describing the inputs, the equations or the results analysis simply aren't defined and have to be divined. The combination of, for instance, the Routh Stability Criterion and MatLab code make this book an uncoordinated jumble of modern, computerized, mindless control-design algorithms and imprecise, antiquated, slide-rule level guesswork. Comparing this to, say, Vallado or Otsuka, Ogata holds no candle. Our professor commented that after using this book in school himself, he failed the class, had to re-take it, become the TA for it in grad school before he understood it. Regardless of the quality of the professor, well-written textbooks don't leave people with that experience. If there is a better text, please someone drop a hint; all I know is, this one ain't it.