electricity

Yes, this book could have been a contender. The field of FDTD has now reached a level of maturity so that it is both useful (very) and the literature no longer explains the details to a beginner. This book is good in that it does talk to the novice; however it has several problems.
First, there are a number of mistakes, and although they are obvious, they are also inexcusable. For example on page 6, eqns 1.14 and 1.15 there are numerous sign errors in the sub/superscripts. The second C program, which is a modification of the first, will not work as written! He forgot to initialize two of the new variables. Careless. For $115 the author and editor could have done a much better job. The book is only 165 pages long; so the editing/proofing should not have taken too long.
Second, the English is inexcusably poor. It sounds a lot like a direct translation of a conversation two graduate students might have at the board.
Third, the book gives very little other than what is needed to gain a limited understanding of the included C code.
All that said, it will get you off square-zero in a fairly short time. I strongly suggest that you check the book out from the library rather than making this expensive purchase.
After you spend a couple of days with this book you will be ready to tackle the class act of E&M FDTD books - Taflove & Hagness - this book has a whopping $135 price tag, but at least it weighs in at 850+ pages and gives a lot of detail.

Generally the book of Dennis M.Sullivan is a book that is a value for money.It really helps someone who would like to learn electromagnetic simulation with the FDTD method step by step.
The 1st chapter introduces you in 1D-FDTD and helps you understand the basics of 1D-FDTD in free space,simple ABCs,propagation in a dielectric and lossy dielectric medium.
The 2nd chapter continues with more complicated issues of 1-D FDTD such as simulation in frequency-dependent media and calculating the frequency dependent media with Fourier Transform.
The 3rd chapter introduces 2-D FDTD,implementation of the PML ABCs and propagation of a plane wave.
The 4th chapter learns you the 3-D FDTD and implementation of the PML in 3D which is really wonderful.
The 5th chapter gives 2 applications with FDTD(Simulation of microstrip antenna and calculation of the far field of an aperture antenna) and the 6th some other types of simulation.
The problem with the book is that the programs have some mistakes and you must spend a lot of time to find them.Personally i have developed all of them except for the patch antenna.If someone has found the mistakes in it and has the right program please send it tome in the email .......My advice is to buy this book!!!

This book is very good for the people who already have knowledge of FDTD and C language somehow. In other words, beginners will feel difficulty to read this book keeping what the auther is really try to talk about. The last two example cases are very useful. However, readers should find the way to present the data files that can be calculated using the sample codes such as MatLab. If you are a beginner, then use the book written by Hagness & Taflove for deep understanding of FDTD, and use this book for the practice before your specific application.

From a new grad student's perspective, i have to say that this book is absolutely terrible!! The writers provided NO useful examples in the chapters and for the examples that are there, they never showed how they generated the results. Its pretty obvious that these guys are not interested in teaching and that very little thought was put into this book. I would recommend this book be banned from the classroom!

Overall this is a good book in terms of coverage and explanation of methods. My background is in math and physics, however, so sudden shifts of notation (avoidable with just a few lines of explanation) lose me. In chapter 4 we find "The transmission network consists of complex impedances" followed by a definition of the network Y matrix. But wait: the Y matrix is defined in terms of a y value for each line. What is the y value for a line? Is it an impedance? No, it's an admittance, but the text doesn't mention that conceptual inversion. Another example is in problem 4.2 of the same chapter. This problem contains a diagram with values of X for each transmission line. What is X? It looks like it should be Y, judging from the previous problem. But wait, there are no capacitors in our problem diagram, so it's not clear. I scan through the preceding chapter for some variable whose standard notation is X. No luck. This makes an otherwise conceptually clear and methodologically informative book VERY frustrating, at least for those of us not steeped in the typical notation of power systems analysis.

The code that goes with this book uses Pascal. This is difficult as it is hard to get Pascal compiler nowadays. It would be useful if it was written in C. The authors do not have a website for this book. They could have put errata, comments from purchasers and book updates, etc.

This text appears to have been a technical report or a PhD thesis that was modified to become a book. The authors did their best to stretch the page count by providing basic information that is generally known by most senior-level students in electrical engineering or operations research. Even after this exercise, the "real" page count is 108. The remainder of the book was made possible by copying several standard formulas from a statistics book, by downloading and plotting some of PJM's data (isn't the Internet great?), and by providing an amateurish source code for some of the material suggested in the book for the single-unit case.

The book begins by describing the unit commitment problem, referencing a total of 9 journal articles (Page 9), but skipping most of the important references in this area. It is strange to discuss unit commitment (in a book) without mentioning the original work of Muckstadt and Koenig (1977), Merlin and Sandrin (1983), or that of Zhuang and Galiana (1988), to name a few. The authors quickly discount all previous work as being inadequate as it does not handle many of the important elements of a system (leading you to believe that they are going to discuss these issues), such as network constraints or losses. I suggest that they refer to "The Generalized Unit Commitment Problem" by Baldick, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 1995, for a discussion on this subject. I also strongly recommend that Mr. Allen and Ms. Ilic obtain a copy of (the outdated) "Unit Commitment Literature Synopsis" by Sheble and Fahd, IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, 1994. It may serve as a starter on this subject. The most impressive aspect of this book is its depth, or lack there of. The authors manage to provide their deep knowledge of the unit commitment problem and its solution techniques in less than 5 pages.

Chapter 3 describes the unit commitment in a deregulated environment in the most simplistic fashion possible (indicating the authors' lack of any true experience in this business) resulting in six pages of basic material. In chapter 4, the reader is presented with a pathetic review of dynamic programming. Chapter 5 is even more interesting. The authors assume a known price process in the market and optimize each individual generating unit based on these prices. They discuss (in less than 7 pages) the use of dynamic programming to solve the unit commitment (in reality a single generator) with and without generation limits using normal and lognormal price distributions. For those of us teaching dynamic programming to senior or master level students, the three models could serve as a homework assignment. If you are a "quant" on the trading floor, you may want to derive these formulas during your lunch hour.

Chapter 6 is entitled "Price Process of Electricity". Thanks to the statisticians of this world, the reader is bombarded with endless tests and distributions describing electricity prices. The authors skillfully demonstrate their ability to use Matlab to draw a large number of graphs.

I must admit that I stopped reading when I reached Chapter 7 "Computational Complexity of the Unit Commitment". The authors say that the dynamic programming is widely used for solving stochastic optimization problems "however, it also has the disadvantage of non-polynomial (NP) growth of operation count with respect to problem size." They refer the reader to the book by Bertsekas on Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control. The authors abruptly shy away from discussing this subject. Given the depth of the book, I would have expected a proof showing that the problem being discussed (the unit commitment) is NP. It is not sufficient to say that their formulation suffers from exponential growth. If the matter is so simple, I have several problems that I modeled as dynamic programs and would like to claim that they are NP (including a couple of linear programs that I solved using dynamic programming as I was lazy to call the LP solver).

In summary, the book is a waste of time and money. It is a sad demonstration of how tenure and graduation pressure can lead people to publish garbage. If you need to learn about this subject, I suggest searching the web for articles related to deregulation. Then, you can buy Bertsekas's book (or refer to your notes from college), use your good old Schaum's Series on statistics, and derive the results that truly fit your problem.

The unit commitment problem is stated using math formulas which contain 28 symbols. To understand the formulas, it is necessary to memorize the definition of each symbol. If you have the patience, you can translate the formulas into something coherent in about 3 hours. The result is rather straight forward and forms a basis for understanding which, theoretically, is the purpose for which the book was written.

For those who are already familiar with the symbols, see the review by the reader from Yonkers.

Excellent book. Definite keeper for anyone working in the market. Appreciate the source code and data which backs up the paper. For those who believe in cost based world, get this book and compare your results

We used this book in our electromagnetics class at UT Austin. I did not like this book at all. It did not clearly explain many concepts. Further there were many errors in the book, for example, in the sample problems. The result was that you were never sure if you didn't understand what was being explained or if in fact the book was just plain wrong. This is not a good book for learning electromagnetics.

I think that the book was alright but only because the author was teaching the course. The man is insane to be sure. Some of the lost details were filled in by his lecture while others were left as an exercise. I wish that I never had seen this book or taken this course.

We used this book for a two quarter sequence in EM. The book is very solid and thorough in the begining with Maxwell's Equations. It is a little empty concerning static fields with only one chpater devoted to it. It is, however, a very readable texbook with most of the answers in the back

I don't recommend this book to students in physics! There are logical and mathematical errors in this book, and it is impossible not to find them if you really read it. (!)
I do recommend it to everyone that wants to pretend that he/she reads books about physics. In this case, whenever you find an error, you are invited to believe that this is too complicated for you to understand, so you can just take what D. Jiles says for granted.

Well, I read several other texts on magnetism since I first rated this book and now my opinion has somehow changed. It ISN'T that bad a book and I suppose that the errors will vanish in later editions. So... its OK. :-)

An extremely well written book, easy to read. I have been looking for a book like this for sometime now and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

By the way, the book has 240 pages and not 416, as advertised

It is a pity that this book does not deliver what the title promises. One would expect, given the author, the publisher and the price, a rigorous treatment of the main electrical and magnetical magnitudes, the historical problems related to their characterization and quantification and the apparatus used for doing so. Nothing of the sort. The book is a soft and not very innovative account of the history of electricity and magnetism, relying mostly on second hand information and following the biographical lead of the "classical heros", from Thales to J. J. Thomson, via Gilbert, Franklin, Volta, etc., but without any effort in the direction of the history of ideas (and much less instruments or measurements, which are only mentioned in passing). A good present for curious teenagers.

The price is outrageously high.

IEEE Spectrum

Murray Eden

By and large, studies of a technical area still focus on the evolution of devices or systems, but some have begun to examine the people responsible for important developments. They probe their motives, the impediments that they faced, how their personalities affected their work, and how they were influenced by the obstacles they had to overcome.

Joseph Keithley writes very much in this spirit. In his words, "It is a story of electricity and magnetism written from a measurer's point of view." The book presents a beguiling picture of the ways in which a multitude of measurements and a smaller number of theorists put all the puzzling phenomena of electrostatistics and magnetics together to create the principles underlying our current understanding of these fields. As the title suggests, this collection is a story told in episodes, each one a tale of an attempt to come up with a better instrument, a novel experiment, or a fresh theory.

Keithley rarely anticipates future developments, which is more a virtue than a vice. Each piece of work is described in terms of the researcher's own discovery. The text is illuminated with many of the actual instruments used-a valuable addition. The reader, whether a trained engineer, student, or educated layman, will sense the confusion, the false starts, the conflicting theorizing. In this way the author captures the spirit of scientific progress and interplay between theorists and experimenters.

This idiosyncratic collection of stories is well worth reading. The electrotechnologist will recognize the main theme as the triumphs of science and the foundation of his or her profession. The novice should catch the excitement. It is to be hoped, too, that those wishing to enter our profession will be inspired to delve deeper into the history of electricity and magnetism.

I felt the book was outdated. Much of the content seems to be from much earlier editions and not relevant for todays more sophisticated automotive electronics. It would be more suited for an enrty level mechanic. The preview for the book is somewhat misleading, makes you feel it offers more than it really does. Therefore it did not meet my needs and I am returning it.

For those of you who are looking for more than the typical Automotive Magazine information regarding automotive electronics – this book is a GOLDMINE. It is the best technical reference I have ever seen and the information is accurate. The author James E. Duffy knows more about modern automotive electronics than anyone else that I have found does. This book impressed me so much (after I had borrowed a copy) I searched it out on the net to purchase my own copy. Mr. Duffy covers the electrical systems in depth, all the ins and outs of computer control in the Big Three plus more. What interested me the most of the practical hands on approach to testing sensors and the specs of devices used. Want to know they typical outputs of Oxygen Sensors so you can test them with a handheld digital meter rather than buy some $$$ outdated tester? This is the book for you. Another example – one concise page covers pulling the trouble codes from GM, Ford and Chrysler vehicles. The garage charged my son $$$ to pull the codes on his Neon and said the results were inconclusive. I was able to pull the codes using the steps in this book and trace it to the EGR Solenoid. Starters, alternators, injection, it is all here in one book, you can throw away all the Fix- It books sold in auto parts stores which have maybe one chapter at the back covering eight model years of changes on three pages. I don’t think you will find anything better than this book. Good Luck.

what is transmission? transmission history analog signal and digital signal digitizing

Good electronic sense of basic communication.

For people with good analog electronic knowledge.

OK we can't expect miracles for [this price] and 128 pages, but this book does not fulfill its promise of being a 'handbook'. It is best characterized as a 'primer' on capacitors, and not a good one at that. The treatment is very superficial with little hard data or usable reference links. Missing are any specific characteristic curves, concrete discussion of packaging, solderability (what are the soldering issues for metallized SMT polyester caps?), surface mount package styles and characteristics, inductive effects, silicon capacitors, voltage and frequency and pulse nonlinearities, safety rated capacitors, and so on. Diagrams where included are of a highly generic nature only. Also missing is a basic exemplar list of capacitor vendors and what they make - or any resource list except for a 6-entry bibliography of outdated or out of print material. It is also out of date generally (polycarbonates are discussed altho they have been discontinued for a year now). While I agree with the author that capacitors are largely 'misunderstood and misused', this book does not do much to clarify matters in a concrete way.

This is a great book for the design engineer. The book is unlike most on the subject, in that it covers the "real world" aspects of using capacitors. The book thoroughly covers the strengths and weaknesses of each type of capacitor as it relates to various applications. Highly recommended.

This handbook is one of the original trilogy of electronic components by Mr. Kaiser. It pulls together in one manual the basic concepts and principles on capacitors and is an essential refernce manual for the electonics techinician as well as a core curriculum for the teacher.

This reviewer has almost 30 years in the electric power and electrical engineering industry. This book is NOT a good book for an introductory course in electric power systems. The authors are obviously too interested in lecturing to audiences using somewhat obscure and superfluous mathematics, rather than teaching what otherwise should be a sensible and lucid course in electric power systems. In fact, the instruction in electric power systems is almost wholly obfuscated by its focus on mathematical irrelevancy. The book attempts to use too much of an "electronics" approach, e.g., one-port systems notation, control theory, linear systems analysis (matrix mathematics) etc., and circumvents clear description and use of electric power system analytical practices that would be of much more use to future power engineers. The weighty matrix applications are tiring, inefficient, and unnecessary, and as applied to electric power systems analysis, should be reserved for large network analysis, rather than as applied throughout this book. This book would never be retained by students for use in their professional careers as "working" power engineers. Professors who use this book in their classes are careless, irresponsible, or ignorant of what the power industry requires of its engineers. Because more universities are using such books, it is clear why so many graduating power engineers are appearing in the electric power industry without any '60-cycle' knowledge, and proving themselves unprepared to conduct even the most basic electric power analyses. Far superior books would include: Theodore Wildi's, "Electrical Machines, Drives, and Power Systems", or Robert Eaton's, "Electric Power Transmission Systems." In summary, this book should be re-titled as, "Mathematics for Power Systems Analysis".

Riddled with errors and typos, this book has nothing new to offer. For the beginning student, the only new book on the market that seems to be good is Power System Analysis and Design by Glover et al. Power Systems Analysis by Vittal (the book I'm reviewing) has unclear wording, strange ordering of topics, and is in general more difficult to read than other texts. Sometimes, it is really terse when it should not be. I should note that every other book I've read on the subject is better (including the text by Stevenson, the text by Glover, and the text by El-Hawary). However, this book has its strong points and could be of definite interest to some graduate students. All in all, it is not well-suited for beginners as it is sketchy and explains many concepts poorly. I have found El-Hawary's text Electric Power Systems to be unbelievably clear and uncluttered in presentation. I would supplement that text with the more up-to-date text by Glover for a nice introduction to the subject. Finally, I should say that it seems that Vittal's text was mostly copied from the text by Stevenson; it lacks originality. I give it two stars because it does get the point across in most cases, but it is generally a weak textbook.

Surprisingly this book is a great practical reference for practicing power systems engineers. There are several key problems that may be useful in practice that were very helpful.