Customer Reviews

The Essential Guide to RF and Wireless

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is NOT for you if you plan on building or designing an RF circuit. It is definetely not for the TECHNICAL consumer.

But it is meant for people who just want to get the gist of RF technology. This review is to warn people who are planning to get into the area of RF. You may want to purchase RF Circuit Design by Chris Bowick instead. If your into the theory of RF, avoid this book.

3 stars and no less because it was well written. No more no less.

And Carl Weisman was right, when he said "hide the book from engineers."

This book is an excellent overview for a person who does not have a formal background in wireless and RF. I think that the author has used good judgement in balancing depth of coverage and breadth of topics. I would strongly recommend it...surely worth the money. Competing titles that I've seen are not meant for the newbie, and many such as Newton's are good but do not solely focus on the wireless aspect of things. I would hope that the author will bring in more coverage of WAP-like protocols and wireless PDA technologies like the ones used---unsuccesfully or succesfully---in the new Palm devices. Heartily Recommended.

I found The Essential Guide to RF and Wireless to be very helpful in understanding the basic concepts and terminology of the wireless industry. As an avid investor, I have in the past invested in companies that are involved in the manufacturing of wireless components without a clue of how they worked. I just knew that wireless was a rapidly growing industry and is quickly becoming an integral part of our society. This book provided me a basic understanding of how wireless works in a very non-technical matter. It was very easy to read with lots of examples and industry tidbits thrown in. The author takes no liberties regarding the knowledge of his readers and explains even the most basic concepts. This may seem mundane to the more adept readers, but very much appreciated by those of us with little or no knowledge of the wireless industry. I have highly recommended this book to my family, friends, and co-workers and would suggest that investors hoping to benefit from the tremendous performance of wireless stocks give it a read.

If you don't know much about RF and the devices that manipulate it I would recommend this book. I am begining work in the RF field and feel that this book has helped me so that I can progress to other more agressive books.

I read this book out of curiosity in the subject. Having absolutely no background in the RF industry, I found the book very easy to read. The author frequently used analogies which I found to be extremely helpful in understanding the concepts. I know I will remember many of them as I can relate them to everyday life. I now understand why my cell phone doesn't work when I drive next to a cell site on the freeway and why my neighbor's satellite TV reception is fuzzy when it rains. There are a lot of interesting 'tidbits' throughout the book and I have found myself repeating some of this trivia to friends or colleagues when I can relate it to our conversation. The topic of RF seemed so foreign to me that I was surprised at how much I understand after reading this book. This subject has been simplified using terminology and analogies that I can easily relate to. Granted, I had no interest in some parts of the book, but I can honestly say I enjoyed reading the majority of the book. I would recommend this book to anyone that wants some insight into this mysterious "thing" that controls so much of our everyday lives.

I found this book useful on clearly describing the many RF components ( like amplifers,mixers,filters,...) and something like discrete,hybrid/MIC,and MMIC manufacturing concepts,in an very easy language , I finish it within 1 hour and I am not an english speaker! so the recommendation is : read this book right in the bookstore and grap a paper not larger than A4 as a note, before you feel your leg tired or want to go ... , you may have finish it .

Way back in high school, just before becoming a computer nut, I was a radio hobbyist and would have really enjoyed this book. Even now, as a CS/EE guy I still found it great toilet seat reading. It's not a heavy, serious book - it's light reading, sometimes annoyingly so; but with that in mind, entertaining & informative. Wish it had more to say about Spread Spectrum. Look forward to the DSP version, but hope it's "heavier".

I recently started a new job where I need a working understanding of wireless systems, and where I need to be able to comprehend and use the vocabulary of the trade. So, I have read several "Introduction to . . ." books. Weisman's Essential Guide is the best so far. He covers basic concepts, does a good job of explaining the terminology, surveys the different types of systems and the components used to build them, and manages to keep everything readily understandable. If you need to pick up the concepts quickly, pick up this book.

I read "The Essential Guide toTelecommunications" by Dodd before and liked it so I assumed that "The Essential Guide to RF and Wireless" would have a similar quality. Wrong! As I was reading this RF book, it became apparent that the author himself is not an RF engineer. The book is full of RF engineer bashing and even contains technical mistakes. For example, on page 49, the 1dB compression point is defined as "the highest power the amplifier can put out and still be in the linear region". Any RF engineer will tell you that the 1dB compression point lies in the nonlinear region (1dB away from the linear extrapolation)! This book has obviously not been reviewed by technical experts (proofread by an accountant instead) and I wonder how the publisher can let this happen.

It seems that the author wrote this book not to educate but to meet his own financial needs. On page 4 he wrote: "I have included only one formula for you to memorize in the entire book; here it is: B=M. This equation means the more book which are bought, the more money I make". There are several other comments like this.

Only after I bought the book , I saw the small print on the cover: "Perfect for ... non-engineers!" I really hope that the title be revised to reflect this intended readership. The book wastes pages after pages on trivial facts that even high school students would know.

The author says he is working on another writing project "The Essential Guide to DSP". I do hope that the publisher arranges to have his next book reviewed by DSP experts. DSP is a very mathematical subject and please don't write the B=M equation again!

I purchased this book after starting a job as an embedded programmer in an RF group. The material in the book provided a good introduction, a basic understanding of the concepts and some useful vocabulary. However, I found the writing style used by the author to be a hinderance to reading the book.

The author liberally includes little comments for the reader enclosed in parantheses. The first few are sort of funny, but the more frequently they occur and they do occur frequently, they start to become annoying. The point of these comments seem to be (a) to poke fun at engineers, (b) to dumb down the material and I suppose (c) entertain the reader.

A few examples: "... the output power at point A is expressed P1 dB (pronounced p wun' d b)..." p. 49 and "Some RF engineers pay big bucks
for a Low Noise Amplifier with a super low Noise Figure. (The rest of us just invest in mutual funds.)" p. 46 These just get in the way of the flow of the text and detract from the book as a whole.

The book is describing a technical subject, why pretend otherwise. Yes it is an introductory text but the people who will read it want to get information from it. They are intelligent enough to draw conclusions from the text, relate the material to their work and remember what they have read. Treating the reader otherwise, as I feel this book does, seriously detracts from its usefulness, by making the reader wade through a lot of unnecessary text.

This book can serve as a good introduction but be warned that you might have to wade through the writing a little bit.