Customer Reviews

The Complete Handbook of Magnetic Recording

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I found this book to be poorly organized, badly written, and when it came to the physics of magnetism and magnetic materials, absolutley opaque: I've never seen a more incomprehensible account of the difference between B and H anywhere. The bizarre use of the pole concept is utterly out of step with modern magnetic physics. Abbreviations for measurement units are indicated on graph axes without any discussion in the text about what the units mean. The figures are the worst I've ever seen in a technical book, consisting mostly of low-resolution bit maps. I suggest that the author thoroughly review the American Institute of Physics style manual on how to draw figures before doing another edition. It would seem to me that a book of this size (>800 pages) would be able to reveal the linear bit density on a standard 3-1/2" 1.44 MB floppy disk, the orientation of the magnetic moments on the disk tracks, the magnitude of a one-bit magnetic moment, the depth of the magnetized regions in the film, and what encoding scheme is used in a single table or on one page of text. I found extracting such information essentially impossible, either because it did not exist or because it was embedded in unobvious places.

I used this book as a reference while developing a MICR reader.
While his work is not directly applicable to discontinuous media, it did open my eyes to some subtle effects that had been giving us problems. Definitely worth a spot on my reference shelf.

He describes also some of the interesting solutions to the problems of finding out exactly what happens during the magnetic recording process.

I do not like the illustrations in your handbook as well, particularly the jagged lines. Could you do something about it in the next revision ? More suitable for newcomers.

For more mathematical treatment, please try Bertram's Theory of Magnetic Recording. This is a killer book if you are not well versed with undergraduate level engineering electromagnetic theory.

When is the next revision coming out ?