Bluetooth Demystified [Paperback]

Nathan J. Muller (Author)

Book Description

Series: Demystified | Publication Date: September 8, 2000

Bluetooth is a wireless networking standard that allows seamless communication of voice, email and such like. This guide to Bluetooth helps to figure out if it's right for your products and services. It details the strengths and weaknesses of Bluetooth and has coverage of applications and products.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Wireless communication slowly is becoming reality. In a wireless world, a printer is installed automatically after it is turned on; keyboard and mouse cables no longer become hopelessly tangled; Palm Pilots and mobile telephones automatically synchronize and communicate. Providing this sort of seamless, wireless communication--at a low cost--is the goal of Bluetooth technology.

Devices that support Bluetooth automatically communicate with one another when they come within a 30-foot range of each other. If devices are compatible and properly authenticated, they start communicating, up to a maximum bandwidth of 1 Mbps. Although Bluetooth has a relatively short range and limited bandwidth, it requires very little power and is theoretically inexpensive. This makes it the ideal technology for portable devices that run on batteries, as well as devices that don't require massive bandwidth.

Bluetooth Demystified is a solid overview of Bluetooth technology for data-communication professionals who want to learn more about this new wireless specification. In many ways, it mirrors the official and more technical Bluetooth 1.0 specification (available online). For those who are familiar with the official specification, many of the diagrams will be familiar, and much of the basic information is the same. This book does not provide explicit information for programmers who are looking to implement Bluetooth support; but, if you want an accessible introduction to Bluetooth technology, this does the job.

Structured to provide an increasingly technical overview of Bluetooth, the book begins with a general overview of wireless technology and provides the motivation for Bluetooth. This creates a solid foundation for the following chapters, which give technical descriptions of the various Bluetooth communication protocols. Chapters on security and proposed usage models flesh out this new wireless communication specification.

New technology platforms always require a critical mass before they become a broadly accepted standard, and Bluetooth is no exception. Success for this technology is not guaranteed, even though an impressive list of companies have promised to implement Bluetooth in their products. Whether Bluetooth is the next Microsoft Bob or the next Palm Pilot remains to be seen. --Pete Ostenson

Review

I would recommend [it] be in the library of every broadband engineering office. ...thoroughly covers both strengths and weaknesses... -- Communications Technology, January 1, 2001

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Product Details

• Paperback: 396 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Professional; 1st edition (September 8, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071363238
• ISBN-13: 978-0071363235
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #878,062 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Lacking Technical Review, October 3, 2000

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Bluetooth Demystified (Paperback)

I am not a Bluetooth expert (hence the purchase of this book) but even to a Bluetooth novice like me it is obvious that this book has clearly not undergone technical review.

A quantitative example of a gross error that should have been caught well before publication, would be the claim, on more than one occasion, that the Bluetooth packet time slots are 625 ms (milliseconds) long as opposed to 625 us (microseconds). This is such a fundamental error it is almost laughable (if it weren't for the fact I paid good money for this book).

Another quantitative example would be in the description of CVSD modulation. Figure 2.7 which shows the relationship of the reference voltage to the signal voltage, with the axes unlabeled so we have to assume the x axis is time and the y axis is voltage, isn't monotonic along the time axis. i.e. the signal actually doubles back on itself with respect to the time axis. This is such a fundamental error it is almost laughable. (Sound familiar.) This error is such that it leads me to believe that the author did not have a good understanding of CVSD modulation.

Silly things like incorrect acronyms should have been caught by any proofreader; VIFR for Very Fast Infrared for example (again on more than one occasion).

This book was clearly rushed out, bypassing any proper review process, to be the first guide to Bluetooth technology, and unfortunately it shows.

I just received my copy of Bluetooth Revealed by Miller and Bisdikian, and from what I have read so far I would have to recommend this over Bluetooth Demystified (by a very large margin indeed).

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars No blue tooth to demystify, January 12, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Bluetooth Demystified (Paperback)

The book covers extraneous information that is not "relevant" to the Bluetooth standard. For example, it has a one-pager on Jini and the last line was "At this writing, Jini's future is in doubt". As a Java developer, I may not necessariy agree, but the book also fail to mention Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) if the author really wants to be impartial and covers the whole gamut of lookup and discovery technologies.

There were also mispelled commercial products (page 7) of Cisco's Aeronet (should be Aironet), but the accompanying digital photos clearly showed Aironet. This is one of the examples where both the author and McGraw-Hill's book editor failed their proofreading and/or research tasks.

The Bluetooth protocol descriptions came pretty much straight out of the Bluetooth specifications, without any comments or analyses. This indicates that that author, in this reviewer's opinion, has limited understanding on how or why the Bluetooth teams arrived at certain technical decisions. The last chapter on Global Scheme of 3G Wireless has little to do with Bluetooth.

I'm rather disappointed with the book in general since it contains information that can be downloaded directly from the Bluetooth Web site (for free). Rather than trying to rush out the "first" Bluetooth book, both the author and publisher should focus on delivering quality content rather than another door stop. Save your $US49.95 for another book.

Normally, this reviewer does not write such a strong opinion unless the book is extremely bad or good. Unfortunately, I am mystified on why this book was published at all.

10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bluetooth without pain, October 10, 2000

By 

George (Basking Ridge, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bluetooth Demystified (Paperback)

This is the only book on Bluetooth I've actually been able to read. As in his excellent Telecommunications Encyclopedia Nathan really takes the time to explicate and explain concepts, not simply list them, as if you already knew most of what he's discussing. Page through the book: nearly every other page has a useful table or figure helping to illuminate the writing. The description of BT protocol architecture is the best I've ever seen. If you're a fan of Nathan's encyclopedias, or someone needing to learn (painlessly) the basics of Bluetooth, check this out.