Customer Reviews

The Fields of Electronics: Understanding Electronics Using Basic Physics

5 star:		(1)
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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Great book concept, but needs tighter editing. The author is expert at the topic matter, and has personal drive to educate EEs to think about field physics not just the customary lumped element circuit theory, to understand what they're doing rather than blindly follow rules of thumb or handed-down oral tradition of their industry. Better understanding of electrical systems as physical electromagnetic systems will be ever more important in the 21st Century with spacecraft, high energy particle accelerators, medical equipment, digital devices running at mumble-mumble zillion hoogaHertz frequencies, and in specialties critical to pushing the limits of performance such as signal integrity engineering.

The earlier chapters will be easy review for advanced students and practicing engineers - Ohm's law, power and such. Later chapters gave me insights to how electric and magnetic fields, charges and current interplay in real life electronics. The math is fairly easy going - i didn't see any calculus or vector math. Even the chapter on Poynting's vector has no vector math. All directional concepts are given with arrows in illustrations. Some familiarity with phasors may be useful, but only the concept; there are no complex number equations here either. The fancier math is great for ideal textbook problems of perfect cylinders, but hard to apply to real life equipment. The book's emphasis is on magnitudes and intuitive concepts.

The book is imperfect, unfortunately. There are problems given for practice with answers in back of the book (and not just for the odd-numbered) but some of these are marred by typos or unclear explanations in the answers. The text in general could use polishing. Some paragraphs seemed redundant or could be reworded. Some illustrations didn't make their point clearly.

However, given the expertise and street-smarts of the author, a smart engineer should be able to figure their way around these flaws and pick up fresh insights. Parts of the book seemed somewhat more like a brain dump than a well-crafted story. The best thing about this book is that it fills the gap between most electronics books that may describe field only in specialized situations (IC design, microwave shielding, etc.) and physics books that are almost always far to theoretical and mathematically sophisticated for the practical-minded engineer. Morrison has be praised for his expertise covering the range of 60Hz power up to GHz. Of course, what good are the laws of physics if they don't apply everywhere? The physics ideas are simple, taken one at a time; it's the application to practical problems such as shielding where this book helps.

The book came out in 2002. My hope is the author gets enough feedback and demand to put out a 2nd edition, with much tighter technical editing and fresh illustrations.

I'm reviewing a university library copy with a drab black cover, so i don't get to enjoy the colorful blue and orange cover as shown above.

This is a very helpful book for practicing electrical engineers. It discusses in detail the relationship between basic physics (particularly field theory) and electrical engineering, and shows how a knowledge of practical physics forms the basis for a complete understanding of electrical phenomena. This book fills a gap left by most college physics courses, which are too theoretical to be helpful with practical engineering problems. Five stars.

I really wanted to like this book. Truly. But it fails. Miserably. It does not represent a comprehensive approach to circuit and field theory. What I mean by this is that there is absolutely no method or application of field theory that provides insight into the quantitative design requirements of electronics to be found here. There is some solid construction advice concerning shielding and grounding, but this is probably better covered in the author's previous works. The numerous mistakes, not just typos, should have been caught in editing. The "fields" of schematic circuits... I wish they were laughable.
The graphics are not even good enough to make this pass as a good con job.