Book excerpt: Introducing engineering students to numerical analysis and computing, this book covers a range of topics suitable for the first three years of a four year undergraduate engineering degree. The teaching of computing to engineers is hampered by the lack of suitable problems for the students to tackle, so much effort has gone into making the problems in this book realistic and relevant, while at the same time solvable for undergraduates. Taking a balanced approach to teaching computing and computer methods at the same time, this book satisfies the need to be able to use computers (using both formal languages such as Fortran and other applications such as Matlab and Microsoft Excel), and the need to be able to solve realistic engineering problems.