electricity

Walt Patterson does an excellent job in his book Transforming Electricity. He provides the reader with a basic understanding of the evolution of the electric power industry in the context of history. He then identifies, clearly and understandably, the forces that are changing today's grid based electric power industry. Especially chilling is his look into the future down two very different but possible paths -- one that leads into a bleak world of power scarcity and unreliability and one that leads to a new and brighter alternative of distributed on-site power. Transforming Electricity could be considered the Rosetta Stone for a radically changing industry -- NextGen Power.

Asimov presents these aspects of phyiscs in bite-size pieces that anyone can digest. He uses everyday examples and only one or two simple equations to add emphasis. He explains where the math comes from and uses small diagrams to add a visual context. Some of the things he talks about are slightly out of date, but the history of the science is still interesting and enlightening. In general, the book is a bit of a snoozer, even for the hard-core science geek, but definitely worth reading for anyone who wants to understand these aspects of physics better.

Wow this was good it taught me soo much I didn't even think you can learn that much and it was kewl hehe awsome now let me win some money

Sorry I couldn't resist. The punssibilities are endless here. I really enjoyed this book and found the history intriguing. Starting with the earliest attempts to harness wind in ancient times, the author brings us forward through 12th century Europe, early American settlement, western expansion (a Conestoga wagon with a sail?), the industrial revolution, the Depression, post WW II America, the Arab oil embargo, the boom and bust of the early 1980's and the precarious state of affairs for wind energy in the 1990's. The tale ends in 1996. If you've ever wondered: "Why VHS versus Beta?" or "Why internal combustion versus external combustion?" or "Why water, but not wind?". This may be the book for you. What succeeds and what fails in the market place and the market place of ideas doesn't always "make sense" from a long term perspective, but short term considerations are always a reality that must be dealt with. Of particular interest in this book is the history of the American windmill pioneers from the 1920s to the 1950s who designed both for water and electrical production. Entrepreneurs and their companies long forgotten make for interesting lessons for any innovator seeking to challenge the status quo. This naturally leads to a tale of the trade off between centralized versus distributed power generation and forces that battled for supremacy. It also begs the question: What makes a subsidy? Clearly centralized power won, but the oil embargo of 1973 breathed new life into the technology. So why didn't it take off? Dr. Righter takes a through a tale of great expectations followed by great disappointments in the 1980s. The nineties bring even more surprises. Do you know who tried to opposed wind power in California? How about environmentalists. Believe it. Since the book ends in 1996, it's a little out of date if you want the latest and greatest status of wind energy production (you can get a lot of it on the internet), but the book covers the history well and is well documented. It also tries to strike a tone which is, in my mind, fair to all parties concerned. All too often the subject of alternative energy can give rise to utopian visions of problem free power or tales of conspiratorial corporate evil. I didn't find that here. He addresses the pros and the cons and has realistic expectations of the even greater possibilities. And most importantly he points out that the cost of any energy source must include the larger price society pays for it (pollution, disease, waste disposal, environmental impact, etc.) when comparing it to other means of production.

When I first saw this book, I was very astonished. I think its content is very useful to many engineers dealing with wireless communications product. This book has many useful analysis and tips which we must consider in mass-producting wireless product such as CDMA, PCS phones. In RF and Mass Product world, noise, interference and Environment is very important and this book deals with it. In short, it will be very helpful practically.

Picked this book up at a yard sale for 50 cents. I was so impressed with it I drove back to Tucson AZ and got the other 12 copies. Have re-read it and done some checking of the sources cited and find that the work is, indeed, credible. On first blush it looks and feels like it would conflict with Christian beliefs. However, from studying the materials and correlating them with the Tanak, Book of Mormon, Immanual Velikovsky, Dead Sea Scrolls, etc, I am find the author has done an incredible job of ferreting out and synthesizing the difficult, yet challenging, "manner of writing of the Jews". The author has an uncanny knack of connecting the language dots and bringing them forward in time. I recommend this book to a serious student of Antiquities and/or Old Testiment - but think for yourself, draw your own conclusion based on your own knowledge and beliefs. Remember that these are theories and they do have more than a small amount of credibility. You have to correlate and dig, but the author is credible on the face of his research and conclusions. Look forward to reading his further delving into this quagmire of the unknown!

I used this book with a group of 3rd - 5th graders and they were able to make the projects and understand the principles behind the science. It is a very useful book.

This book, as well as the many tales of the ENIAC, are factually incorrect. This was even proven by a federal judge in the state of Minnesota.

On October 19, 1973, US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision following a lengthy court trial which declared the ENIAC patent of Mauchly and Eckert invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer -- the Atanasoff-Berry Computer or the ABC.

Mr. McCartney does a great job of ignoring the facts that were proven in the case,and instead believes the hearsay, and tarnished depositions that were later recanted.

Scott McCartney has written an excellent counterbalance to the current literature on the invention of the computer. It is a fine contrast to Herman Goldstine's book on the subject. Here, we see a johnny-come-lately view of the great mathematician John von Neumann, a man whose profound insight into the future value of an all-electronic calculating machine gives him the shared title of inventor of computer science (along with A. Turing), not the computer. This book leaves us no doubt, it was Eckert and Mauchly's creation, a plum that many others wanted credit for once it matured. The general purpose electronic computer is fittingly the invention of an electrical engineer (Eckert) and a visionary physicist (Mauchly). This is also a good resource on the entry by women into the world of computers. I was only disappointed that McCartney did not include a bit more of the technical, engineering details about ENIAC, and its comparison to the COLOSSUS, perhaps in an appendix.

Eniac is exciting; as riveting as the best fiction. What this book shines at is telling the story of people. I felt I really knew the players, felt the politics swirling, and the ache of frustration Mauchle and Eckert must have felt by the time I finished. The author found many rare photographs I've never seen in print before.

My mind is changed about the history of the first computer. After checking the author's facts against what I thought I knew, I discovered that, as Will Rogers said, "It's not what we don't know that gets us in trouble, it's what we do know that 'taint so." McCartney's book is an important work of scholarship, not yet another candy-coated trip down core memory lane.

Bottom line: Eniac is a book worth reading and worth owning. Read it, visit a library and use the excellent bibliography to check the author's conclusions.

I found this book to be very easy to read. Once you understand this book, then you can read Gray & Meyer or more advanced books pretty easily. I have never read a real beginners book in Electronics and I was still able to understand it. Nevertheles this book might be a little too advanced for some people who are studying electronics for the first time. However for a mid-level book it's pretty good and people should not judge the book harshly if their professor assigned it for a beginners class-it's not the book's fault but the professor's. I had struggled with many bad mid-level books and so I know this book does a good job compared to many. I originally had the first edition. I had read it so many times that the pages were falling off, so I bought the second edition as well. I skimmed through the latest edition and it's almost the same as the second edition.

This book is the best book that suite your Analog Electronics undergraduate course.It really worths the money.
My advice:if you are an intermideate analog electronics student get this book and give it atleast 40% of your time but if that will not fit your schedule let me tell you that: Sedra is for the student who has time to read and solve tons of problems! it is intended to transfet the mid-level of electrical experiance from the author to your brain (this is why it will cost you time).
If you are looking for shortcuts to not exceed the C grade you can simply find something like Floyed book and suchs!.
you can use it as a ref. for the basics of the material if you are an advanced student who dont have another ref.

This text manages to strike a good balance between theory and practice. Device operation is covered in considerable detail, and so are their applications. When deciding on a rating, I'm comparing this book to Analog IC Design by Grey, Meyer, et.al and to Art of Electronics, by Horowitz and Hill. These two books are considered the best in the field, and Sedra/Smith manage to present the material on the par with these two, but give more device operation theory than Horowitz/Hill and somewhat more applications then Grey/Meyer. Personally, I like all 3 books and have them all.

And for people who give bad reviews due to lack of spice integration, typos, and other minor nuances: no book is ever perfect. For example, Grey/Meyer don't cover MOSFET analog switches, while Horowitz/Hill barely go into device operation at all -- they just give rough equations and rule-of-thumb tips. Yet these two books are still considered great. I think Sedra/Smith wrote a book on the par with industry standard texts.
I, for one, was able to skip lectures given by my incoherent prof. and learn solely from this book.

Yes, it is very mathematically demanding. Yes, some of the discussions (particularly towards the ends of chapters) are thoroughly inpenetrable. And yes, each chapter features a few problems of the type "Show that (horrendous expression)=(even worse expression)=(multi-line, triple sum of modified Bessel functions expression)." But with a serious effort you'll make it through the first 3/4 of every chapter and >half the problems; the remaining parts are usually specialized topics anyway. The hardest part of studying this text is simply the large amount of time you need to invest; it doesn't read like Griffiths' book. And what did you expect, E&M to be easy?

To those of you who truly hate this book (and judging by the reviews, there's a fair number of you), you might try the following substitutes/supplements: 1) Landau's Classical Theory of Fields: covers E&M in vacuo, with special relativity present from the beginning. Worked problems, E&M section is ~200 pages. 2) Mathews and Walker, Mathematical Methods- useful for special functions (Jackson's Chap. 3 presentation is somewhat brief). 3) Landau's Electrodynamics of Continuous Media- covers E&M in matter. I haven't used this one (yet), but people seem to love it. Again, worked problems. (Of course, find them in the library first!)

There is a reason that so many universities use this text for graudate courses in E&M. Every single special function that I successfully avoided as an undergrad has shown up within the pages of this text. Jackson is thorough and more thorough. Chapters 2 and 3 introduce fundamental techniques that must be mastered in order to understand the rest of the text. Jackson's treatment of separation of variables (while solving Laplace's Equation) does not stop with the introduction of Legendre Polynomials and Spherical Harmonics... he then introduces Bessel Functions, and eventually connects Green's Functions with expansions in spherical and cylindrical coordinate systems. He has a brief section on mixed boundary conditions at the end of chapter 3. For anyone looking for a very comprehensive text on the subject of electrodynamics, I strongly recommend this book.

First off, this is either a graduate book or a senior undergraduate book in Physics. The book assumes at least 2 years of college math, preferably for engineering or physics folks.

What sets this book apart is the focus on physics is perfect as we understand E&M theory at this point. Unlike other imperfect college texts like Lorraine and Courson, this book contains no errors. While some may no like "and the proof is left to the reader", the book is meant to teach people who are focused on physics but can describe the process mathematically as well as in regular language.

The assumption is that there has already been a rigorous introduction of both physics and mathematics so this book is NOT a casual read.

The beauty of this book is that it's not just teaching knowledge but it teaches one how to think. To those who can rise to the occasion and draw upon their education, professors and peers, there is the satisfaction of really understanding E&M clearly and concisely.

To those who only seek rote knowledge, this book will be too challenging.