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Rating: 
Summary: Simply fantastic!
Review: I have waited forever for someone to put this technical subject in terms that anyone can understand. Lampton deserves 5 stars for his ability to make complicated subjects understandable to the layperson.
Rating:
Summary: Simply fantastic!
Review: I have waited forever for someone to put this technical subject in terms that anyone can understand. Lampton deserves 5 stars for his ability to make complicated subjects understandable to the layperson.
Rating:
Summary: A Quick Education for Everyone
Review: This 1991 book is still educational. Information is anything you didn't already know. Noise is unwanted information. Information is received through out senses; some people have more sense than others. Predators seek prey, prey avoids predators. Communication is sending messages between living organisms. Humans use speech and writing (or painting, etc.) to communicate. Telecommunications go back thousands of years, to lanterns, semaphores, and smoke signals. "one if by land, two if by sea." Nowadays it refers to the use of electricity, and it has had a profound effect on the modern world.Part One tells about Analog Telecommunications. It explains modulation, encoding, bandwidth, and noise. Electricity flows in a circuit, and can be pulsed (the electric telegraph used the Morse code). The telephone uses electricity to generate sound waves. Speech is mostly frequency modulation. Wires are required to communicate. Radio uses electromagnetic waves to communicate. Part Two tells about Digital Telecommunicatons. It uses the on or off state to send digital data, which can be encoded analog signals (like the teleprinter). Digital data is less subject to errors and degradation in transmission. The binary numbering system uses 0s and 1s to represent larger numbers. Binary information follows standard representations. Compact discs use digital numbers to store and replay analog sound. Error correcting codes result in high reliability. The advantage in future digital communication systems is the potential to be interactive. The book's prediction of ISDN usage has not materialized so far.
Rating:
Summary: Makes you feel smart, with little effort on your part!
Review: This guy makes technical topics go down like butter-coated oysters. His style is easy to read and highly illustrative. He is a top-notch technical writer--nothing short of godlike. As for the book, it helped me out a great deal at work, when I had to research a topic quickly. I'm looking forward to reading more by this author.
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