An Engineering Approach to Optimal Control and Estimation Theory

Rating:
Summary: Unprofessional comments on a very professional book
Review: "An Engineering Approach to Optimal Control and Estimation Theory" is the most amazing piece of rubbish I have found at that price in my life ! I wonder whether the author even knows what proofreading means. The book is so full with mistakes, typos, false or misleading statements, that I becomes unreadable. You can open it at almost any page and find a severe mistake.

The author argues that the book is aimed at engineers, and not theorists. This is no excuse for so many errors.

This book gives the overall impression that it has been written once and never proofread, by an author who maybe bet that his name would compensate for very poor writing.

A must .. leave on the shelf.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Book for Control Engineers
Review: As an industrial control engineer and a reader of "An Engineering Approach to Optimal Control and Estimation Theory", I would like to recommend it to my colleagues. This book aims at making some complicated topics accessible to general readers (such as engineers and practitioners) rather than scaring them away by lengthy derivation of mathematics without practical context.

This elementary treatise seems to have covered most important aspects of theoretical fundamentals, such as stochastic processes, parameter estimation, filtering techniques, regulation control, tracking control, and optimal control. And yet what is good and perhaps unique about this book is its practical examples and many exercises, which I found very helpful in my reading and learning the subject. This really is a book written by an engineer for engineers.

Certainly nothing is perfect, not even many texts written by "applied" mathematicians. In this concern, I would like to bring readers' attention to the book author's self-corrections of typographical errors which was published as errata in the IEEE AES Systems Magazine, in the January issue of 1997. I think the author found most typos and published them for correction soon after the book was placed in the market. Along with his list of corrections is a nice book review article written by an engineering professor of Argentina (in a much more professional manner than what I surprisingly see in the above). These should help the readers contrast the above unprofessional comments with a fair judgement about this book.

Rating:
Summary: Unprofessional comments on a very professional book
Review: I am using "An Engineering Approach to Optimal Control and Estimation Theory" by G. Siouris for sometime as the main guidance material for solving some practical problems. The book is excellent. It provides straight forward answers to all development and implementation-related questions that have been raised by engineers and applied scientists working in the relevant areas. After reading the comment put by C. Bernard on www.amazon.com I had to take a second look at this book. The book indeed is excellent! It does contain some typos but these typos can mislead only a layman, and fortunately, it is virtually impossible to find a layman among those who implement Optimal Control and Estimation Theory in real life projects. An engineering student would enjoy the way the material is presented, and would not be obstructed by typos. Moreover, I found C. Bernard's comment quite inappropriate. It is not aimed at the improvement of the book but seems to reflect some personal motives. I hope that with the help of readers like myself G. Siouris will fix the typos in the second edition and C. Bernard will learn some good Internet manners.

Rating:
Summary: A didactic jewel for a student and gold mine for an engineer
Review: Recently I had a chance to read Dr. Siouris' excellent book "An Engineering Approach to Optimal Control and Estimation Theory." As a practicing engineering manager, I found this authoritative modern book written clearly and with good didactic style, which should appeal to engineers and students dealing with the applications of optimal control theory. In spite of some typographical errors, typical of a first edition,and which the careful reader can easily spot, I rate this book very highly. Moreover, such blemishes can be detected very easily and corrected by an instructor, and do not detract from my conclusion that the book can be highly recommended. As a matter of fact, the author himself discovered these typos and subsequently published them in the IEEE AES Magazine's January 1997 issue. I myself, which any reviewer with professionalism and decency, brought some of these errors to the author's attention. Finally, this book is a must reading for every practicing engineer in the areas of computer engineering, guidance and control, business management, economics, etc.