Booklist & Strategy for Preparing Electrical Engineering – by Rank 9 Ashish Kumar

I devoted a lot of my energies into my optional subject, Electrical Engineering. This subject has a huge course but if it can be managed then it usually gives great returns.

Start Preparing Early

The syllabus of Electrical not being small, Starting early for EE helps since you need time to complete theory, practice numericals and revise.

My order of doing things was that I first completed the theory. Then solved examples from the book, and then revision and previous year question paper side-by-side.

Time taken to Prepare Electrical Optionals

It took me around 5 months from November’2013 to March 2014 to complete the bulk of the Electrical Engineering syllabus along with my training in Railways. During this time I also prepared notes of the subjects. Thereafter I started practising solved examples from the books till around mid June 2014.

However some subjects like Network Analysis, Signals and Systems and certain gaps were still left in the individual subjects. This I tried to do post Prelims. Post Prelims apart from this, I again practised problem solving. Also having made notes at an earlier stage, I revised from those notes. I underlined, wrote down key points in short and jotted down formulae separately.

Making Notes for Electrical

The choice of making notes is an individual choice. I preferred to make notes since it made revision easier. Also it was much more convenient to me to study from a thinner notebook than a thick book. Then these notes would give way to even shorter notes and formulae for quick revision.

Whether it is essential to show each step in a numerical to get good marks?

In a proof take care to show all the steps. For a numerical, if certain formulaes are being used make explicit mention of them. As regards the steps, ideally you should try to include all the steps. Do not assume that the examiner will understand a particular thing on his own. However if you find that the space if constraining you from showing all the steps, you can leave out the most trivial ones.
I do not think presentation matters to a great extent. Be straight to the point. Do not miss out anything. Draw block diagrams/circuit diagrams/figures where you can recollect them.
– Practice and revision in recursion.

Prakash Rajpurohit Sir’s booklist and Prince Dhawan Sir’s blogs are of ultimate authority on EE.

Booklist for Electrical Engineering Optional

Paper-I

1. Circuit Theory: A. Chakrabarti
2. Signals and Systems: Oppenheim’s book. For some topics like DFT/FFT, I searched the net for some source and found certain pdfs from which i studied.
3. E.M.Theory : K.D. Prasad. For certain topics like plane waves, polarization , reflection, Smith Chart, impedance matching I referred to Cheng ( since we had studied that in college).
4. Analog Electronics: J.B.Gupta was the main book. For topics not well covered or for those requiring better explanation I referred to Sedra and Smith.
5. Digital Electronics: Morris Mano and R.P. Jain.
6. Energy Conversion: Ashfaq Hussain was the main book which completes the entire syllabus. Since I did not have a very good background in electrical part of the syllabus, I supplemented this with selective readings from NPTEL at times.
7. Power Electronics and Electric Drives : P.S.Bhimbra. This is a tricky book and not liked by those who read it. However it is a very essential book and cannot be ignored. Again since I had hardly studied this in college, I had to supplement this with selective readings from NPTEL pdfs
8. Analog Communication : B.P.Lathi was the main book supplemented by Simon Haykin

Paper-II

1. Control Systems: Nagrath and Gopal. It however does not have sufficient practice questions. For practice, I took up BC Kuo.
2. Microprocessors and Microcomputers: RS Gaonkar. Recently questions from 8086 have also been asked. I tried covering it from certain sources on the internet but found it too confusing and huge and had to restrict myself to only certain 8086 details like addressing modes, certain instruction sets, internal architecture etc.
3. Measurement and Instrumentation : A.K. Sawhney.
4. Power Systems: Ashfaq Hussain was the main book. But it is a very dry book and does not explain things well. So I also referred to Nagrath and another book by Badriram and Vishvakarma.
5. Power System Protection: Badriram and Vishvakarma.
6. Digital Communication: Simon Haykin was the main book supplemented by B.P.Lathi. For data networks and 7-layered architecture, Forouzan was the book I followed along with selective readings from NPTEL.