Customer Reviews

Technician's Guide to Programmable Controllers

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I used this book to train industrial electricians and recommended it in the PLC course I designed at Coyne American Institute in Chicago in 1989. They still use the book along with a lab manual and Allen Bradley PLC's in the electrical maintenance course. I reviewed other books and felt this one was the right choice for the length of course, training level and content. It is clearly written with hardware and instruction set examples from various PLC manufacturers, troubleshooting, number systems, start-up hints and some useful general computer information. Also included is a chapter on understanding MS-DOS commands-very handy for people (a lot of them around) with no computer background except a point-and-click once in a while. The soft cover format, number of pages (372) and size make it easy to carry and throw in a brief case. If you are learning PLC's for the first time, this is a good place to start. If I was going to add anything to it for the next edition, I would include things like data highway, serial communications, remote displays and PID loop. Maybe a little more about programming details involving analog I/O would be nice.

This book is intended for the beginner, it has so may misprints and errors in it makes a hard subject for the beginner to an impossible one to understand! This 4th edition has many of the same misprints in it from the first edition! I would never recommend this book to anyone!

I used this book with great success in the course, Introduction to Programmable Logic Controllers, which I developed for a leading aircraft manufacturer. This book was recommended reading prior to attending other PLC courses offered in my training business.

If you are not a technician... this book will confuse you rather than help you.