Customer Reviews

The Victorious Engineer

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For many years I read Joel Orr's back-page articles in Computer-Aided Engineering magazine. I found them insightful and surprisingly well-written for an engineering trade journal. This book, The Victorious Engineer, is a collection of his best articles. While some of the content is dated, which occurs rapidly with technology related topics, the basic message is timeless. Orr's essential underlying message for all engineers is integrity. The only way to succeed at engineering, or at anything in life, is with honesty, integrity, a positive attitude and a strong moral foundation. I would recommend this book for any undergraduate course on Engineering Ethics. It contains much more valuable, applicable didactic teachings than the typical book on this subject. His ethics are firmly footed in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Because the articles were typically one to two pages, the chapters in this book are short and to the point. That does not make this a quick book to read; Orr's advice is very thought-provoking and reading just a few chapters kept me thinking about them for days. Orr's prose is the best I have ever read in an engineering related publication. Each of the chapters opens with a pertinent quote, drawing from both the familiar and the obscure. This book is one of the most influential engineering books I have read, and I highly recommend it. I hope Joel's new book is equally as good.