Nuts and Bolts

How to start research? Lay out a decent curriculum to train students. The curriculum, in my opinion, should lay a solid foundation with nuts and bolts taste.

Here is an example in control engineering. Before doing optimal control or nonlinear control, let's get very clear on the basics: the classical control. Not only know the principle, techniques, Matlab command but also a few applications to make use of the principles. Another example in optimization. Get down to the algorithms. Get into the details of interior point method, for example.

I list a few books to lay out foundation. Power Systems: Bergen's book. Power Electronics:  Mohan's book. Drive: Bose's book. Optimization: Boyd's book. and of course, as we move forward, many many more excellent textbooks: Wood/Wollenberg's book, Crow's computation book, many control books. Stephen Boyd's many books. In a summary, research starts from textbooks.