Protective Relaying: Principles and Applications (Power Engineering, 5)

Rating:
Summary: An outstanding book
Review: In order to appreciate this book, one must understand the history behind power system protective relaying. As the previous reviewers have mentioned, the two classic bibles in protective relaying is the Westinghouse Protective Relaying book and the Westinghouse T & D book. Lewis Blackburn put the former book together while he worked at Westinghouse and he had a hand in the second book as well. My father attended the Westinghouse training courses in the 1950's and his instructor was Lew Blackburn. Over time, Mr. Blackburn became a family friend and I grew up listening to them talk about the electric power industry and learned about the subject at the feet of the master. Even though I went into motors instead of relaying, I still enjoyed reading this book.

After Mr. Blackburn retired from Westinghouse, he became a consultant and proceeded to put the material in this book together. It was a labor of love, for a lot of people have said that the practice of protective relying is like black magic because there are many correct ways to protect a system, they all have problems but it is up to the practitioner to determine the best solution for a given situation. Mr. Blackburn poured his years of experience and expertise into this book. He tried to do this in a systematic manner in order to reduce the amount of ambiguity usually associated with the black arts. I believe he has succeeded.

I would agree with the others that the second edition was a letdown from the first, but then again, most first editions are more informative because authors wrote "their" book with the first edition, the following editions are ususally to answer the critics and publishers.

Rating:
Summary: Second edition has less detailed examples than the first
Review: In working through the examples, I found that Blackburn decided to remove the details for the solutions of the example problems and just state that intermediate steps are "easily calculated." The answers are still given, but this caused me a problem when I was working the examples and didn't get the answer he presented. I had to refer back to the first edition to catch my error.

I would recommend keeping the first edition if you have it, and purchasing this one since he updates the chapter on generator protection (according to the 2nd ed preface).

Rating:
Summary: Not a coffee table book
Review: This is a bit of a rough effort, and won't be making the Best Seller List, but how many books on this subject do? It seems like a must-have. I would only urge that unless you already know 3/4 of the material, you go through something smoother, such as Power System Analysis by Gross, to get yourself up to that point, because you're likely to be needlessly uncomfortable otherwise. Aside from that, this book will be greatly valued by anyone with serious interest.