Reviews for ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE: EXTREME WEATHER, ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY AND POLLUTION, WETLANDS AND TH...

The average rating for ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE: EXTREME WEATHER, ATMOSPHERIC CHEMISTRY AND POLLUTION, WETLANDS AND TH... based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-01-28 00:00:00 Maurizio Vinciguerra This is a weird one for me.... On the one hand, I'm not the intended audience. I understand how computers work more than most, that's literally my job to write the software that runs the internet. On the other, I AM the intended audience, because I have zero clue how computers work on a hardware level. On a mutant third hand, I'm not really the intended audience again, because I intimately understand the physics behind all of the individual components....complex impedence, inductance, breakdown voltages, RF circuit resonances, and so on. I'm in a weird place where I write the high level software that makes computers work. I understand the theory behind programming languages, object-oriented design, system design, compilers, parallel processing and multi-threading..... I also understand the physics behind the components and why transistors are able to function as logic switches, how data is stored and read magnetically on a HDD platter or, more recently, SSD chips. What's missing is the middle bit. How does a circuit I know in and out turn into the operating system I'm modifying? I was hoping this book might answer that question. In a sense, it did, but not at a level that left me satisfied. I understand better how memory registers function and how you build blocks of switches that are hard-wired function machines. But I'm still missing the middle bit: How does what's in that data register (the machine code instruction byte(s)) end up at the correct block within the processor? How does the output get routed to the correct destination after it's computed....how does it know one result goes to the USB controller to get sent back to some peripheral device, but another gets sent to another controller to trigger a disk write to save a file? Sadly, this book didn't answer that for me. That process was hand-waved away and simplified. And so my quest to find a book to fill that gap in my knowledge continues.... That said, this book is great at what it does. I can't grade it based on my expectations, but on how good it accomplishes its intended goal. I think it achieves that pretty well, with very little in the way of distractions or unnecessary filler.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-11-22 00:00:00 J George I wish I had been made to read this as a senior in high school, or as a freshman in college. I highly recommend it to beginning electrical engineering and biomedical engineering students, as well as those interested in broad-based popular science. It provides a great overview of the fields of electrical engineering and even some biomedical engineering, pulling together many of their interdivisional ideas while covering topics like Boolean algebra/logic, feedback control systems, biology, the brain, evolution, neural networks, computer science and programming, nature vs. nurture debate, cognitive psychology, imaging/image processing, signals & systems, technology, ethics, philosophy and even history. It contains an inquisitive feel that is integral to a true understanding of engineering. It also has some broad based questions that students should be made to think about and maybe eventually solve. It wonderfully ties together a lot of theory in to a coherent text that will help create better engineers (and even thinkers). How do we create questions and then go about answering them. Lots of students suffer from not knowing how all the theory and knowledge interrelate. This book helps synthesize many things into a better whole and allows the reader to see the small pieces that integrate into the big picture.