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Re:CS for All by PascLeRasc on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:27PM (#10036696)
What do they cover in the basic general engineering course?
Re:CS for All by tathougies on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:36PM (#10036752)
The course covers signals and systems. We talk about ways of modeling physical and electrical systems (or any other system really) as combinations of smaller components, and use the characterizations we derive of the smaller systems to characterize behavior of the larger ones. We use tools like the fourier transform to simplify the analysis.

This wikibook seems to cover the same topics: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Signals_and_Systems

Re:CS for All by bgribble on Monday August 10, 2015 @03:49PM (#10036829)
When I took it ~25 years ago it was called Intro to Systems Engineering, and covered the foundational principles of control systems design and analysis of linear dynamic systems. A lot of Laplace transforms, first- and second-order differential equations, relationships between time-domain and frequency-domain behavior, etc.
Re:CS for All by modeless on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @12:56AM (#10039169)
The things I learned in the basic engineering course that really stuck with me were convolution, the sampling theorem, and the Fourier transform. That knowledge has been invaluable.