Customer Reviews

Risk Modeling, Assessment, and Management (Wiley Series in Systems Engineering and Management)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The author spends a great deal of time describing his models and methods (referred to by highly forgettable acronyms) as if they were standards of practice. The writing is not easy to read and the organization of the material and poor indexing do not facilitate use as a reference. A lack of problems and exercises (as well as the use of non-standard terminology) makes the book hard to use as a classroom text.

There are much better book available that cover this material.

When used as a graduate level textbook, this work places extreme demands on the student. The lack of simple examples to explain foundation concepts places the student at a disadvantage from the start. The summary examples at the end of each section seemed to be confined to the author's research work and leave the reader more puzzled than enlightened. The endless stream of acronyms is initially annoying, but then becomes almost comical as the experienced reader (ER) becomes more accustomed to the practice. The text is a good resource for anyone specifically interested in risk management of water resource projects. For the rest of us, we'll have to look elsewhere.

I was dismayed by the low quality of the binding and general production values of this book. The cover binding broke in my first half hour of gentle and practiced use -- I have been handling textbooks as a graduate and undergraduate for nearly 20 years, and I know how to handle a book. The low quality is outrageous given its price of over 100 dollars. One has (sadly) come to expect some price gouging in the marketplace of advanced academic textbooks; however the least such pirates should do is to provide decent quality and production values in their overpriced wares.

On the other hand, this text seems to me to be practically indispensable in its coverage of the mathematical underpinnings of a part of Systems Engineering which has grown greatly in prominence in the past decade or so--That is, risk management. The book is pretty chaotic and appears hastily thrown together from recently published papers and other "young" sources. But (I believe) one has to look past some of the shortcoming and acknowledge that it contains some very valuable material, presented by one of the genuine pioneers in the field.

Although I have been studying risk since the early 90s, this book was unknown to me. It is not for those looking for a quick Wikipedia-like answer on how to analyze risk. It is an extensive work that on its downside may require many hours of studying. On the upside, however, it does contain all you would ever need to know and may not even want to know about the state of the art of risk analysis.

I don't know what happened to my fellow reviewers. It's almost as if they were reading a different book. Well, the one I am holding in my hands right now is the first edition, and maybe it is different from the second edition, reviewed above. For what it's worth, I totally disagree with what my fellow reviewers state, at least when it comes to the third edition, which I have only seen as a Google preview.

Personally, I am amazed at what this book covers. Browsing through the list of contents, I think there ought to be something for everyone here, and I cannot think of much that would make the list more complete.

This book does comes at a very hefty price. Nonethless, I doubt you will need that many other risk books after buying this one. Just my 2 cents.

The book contains many modern risk analysis tools not found in other books of its kind. What I like with the book is that it presents very sound and meaningful challenges to many traditional risk methods and provides alternative techniques to correct these shortcomings. The examples are practical and easy to comprehend. I hope that the future editions shall include exercises (or problems) to serve as mechanism to further hone the understanding of the students (or any readers of the book).