Modern Control Systems

I am a practicing systems engineer in industry. My company, Transpower Corporation, writes custom and commercial engineering and accounting software. Over the years I've purchased many, many control engineering books, including the fourth and seventh editions of Prof. Dorf's Modern Control Systems. At my request, Dr. Dorf sent me the solutions manual. Unlike the other reviewers here, I find the book to be easy reading, particularly because of the many fine illustrations which add immensely to the clarity of presentation. The 800 problems contained in the book cover a very wide range of modern real-life control systems; they are vastly better than the problems contained in any other control book I've purchased.The book is very strong on classical methods, but rather weak on the so-called "modern methods." I happen to prefer the Internal Model Principle and even wrote a software package, Optimal Control Designer, to make that method easy to apply. Unfortunately Dorf treats the Internal Model Principle only briefly. The same goes for LQR and other optimization methods. On the other hand, ITAE and deadbeat systems are treated rather well.The use of MATLAB in the book and problems is very welcome. However, Simulink is not used. Those of us in industry are likely to use Simulink to simulate a proposed system to death before production. Hopefully the forthcoming 10th edition will include example applications using Simulink.One other deficiency is the lack of treatment of real-time computer control (for example using Real-Time Workshop and Real-Time Windows Target). I haven't yet found any text on control which goes into any detail on this subject--those of us in industry would very much like such a text.In summary I highly recommend this book. It's worth the price just for the spectacular set of end-of-chapter problems.