Customer Reviews

ZigBee Wireless Networks and Transceivers

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
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This book is excellent for learning ZigBee/IEEE802.15.4 and short-range wireless networking. I found this book very useful and it has answered many of my questions. I am impressed with its content and this book should be the definitive starting purchase for any ZigBee or IEEE 802.15.4 developer. I manage a small team of application engineers building proprietary wireless devices. We bought all three ZigBee books currently available on the market and we like this book the most.

Here are my comments regarding this book:

Pros:
1. Excellent introduction to ZigBee and IEEE 802.15.4. This book is well written and started us on the right track. The book goes beyond the basics.

2. This book contains a great introduction to the field of short-range wireless networking. Many of the materials discussed in this book (e.g., range calculations, battery life calculations, antenna selection, etc.) are useful and relevant, even if the short-range wireless networking standard is not ZigBee.

3. I liked the fact that the book comes with a website (http://www.LearnZigBee.com). We have used the calculators posted on the website to estimate battery life and various range extension calculations.

4. Coexistence is a challenge for us and this book answered most of my questions regarding coexistence of ZigBee with other proprietary wireless devices.


Cons:

1. The last chapter is a review of other wireless networking standards (e.g., WirelessHART), but it does not go beyond the basics of these alternative standards. We wished to see more information about these standards.

I like this book because it has a lot to offer. It is an excellent book for understanding not only the fundamentals, but also many of the practical trade-offs in low-power short-range wireless networking. This is the only book I found that has done a superb job summarizing the entire IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee standards (more than 1000 pages) into a single chapter. In many occasions, I have used this book as a reference instead of the actual standard documents because this book has almost all of the most frequently used tables and diagrams of these two standards.

The book is well organized, has a lot of diagrams, and is very easy to read. I graduated from college couple of years ago and I believe this book has enough materials to satisfy the thirst of students in academy, while stays very practical and useful for engineers in the field. As someone who is dealing with short-range wireless networking on regular basis, this is the book I like to keep on my desk.

If you are working on zigbee and 802.15.4 this is one of the must have books. A good overview written in an engineering context. So far it is the only book I have found that was really helpful. If you do Google searches for pdf white papers, use the TI,Microchip,Zigbee and Motorola vendor sites and combine with this book a very good picture of the state of the art is found...

All three reviewers before me made excellent comments about this book. I can not praise any better. However i am disappointed with corporate domination on the standards development. to explain I need more space, in short here it is why: While IEEE is perfecting Standard IEEE 802.15.4, ISA (Automation society of America) was also working on a similar standard ISA 100.11a for industrial instrument networks. ISA basically had a goal of selecting one of two vendor protocols as standard, namely Emerson's WirelessHart and Honeywell's OneWireless. Meantime energy sector standardized on IEEE 802.15.4 for their Smart Energy home networking. Two very important specifications of the ZigBee compliant devices are being energy efficient and inexpensive, so many parameters which are not measured today because of the cost can be measured and difficult to reach locations can be monitored. ISA standard does not provide neither of these, and probably will never be an internally accepted standard. Here is another reason why we arre in USA falling behind in manufacturing.