It hasn't made "Read the Can't Miss List!" or special offers in their BestBetBooks in Electronic & Electrical Engineering flyers, so I'll wait until December when they dump it at 40% off. They are currently trying to push Modeling and Verification Using UML Statecharts A Working Guide to Reactive System Design, Runtime Monitoring and Execution-based Model Checking- by Drusinsky
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wonder if that delivers any value; I'm suspicious of these flash-and-dazzle things that spend all of one page per major topic- just overview crap.
That's probably because its so hard to make any nonlinear results apply to anything that isn't the specific system that generated the results. General nonlinear results are hard to understand, hard to compute, and hard to determine whether they apply. So much of the thrust of control theory is about linear systems, and you're expected to make your nonlinear systems fit.
I like your solution for three reasons: One, it's pragmatic -- I bet the PID controller inside is pretty standard. Two, you didn't have to use many nonlinear elements to make it work right. Three, (and this is my own personal quirk), the need for a nonlinear controller arises not because the _system_ is nonlinear, but because the cost function is not x^2 -- it's an important side of nonlinear control that's not always pointed out well.
Hey, today it's ranked at 32000 in books. Yesterday it was 540000. At this time tomorrow it'll be better than 200000 books that haven't even been written yet :-).
Apparently you're as much of a tightwad as me. I did discuss the pricing with my editor -- she was pretty adamant that it was the right price. Besides, you get a CD with code that not only illustrates cool functionality, but it compiles, it runs, and it's been tested & debugged. That's gotta be worth several hundred pages right there, eh?
Or something -- I used SciLab to do the design exercises in the book. SciLab is a free MatLab replacement. In many ways it's better than MatLab, although it does fall down when you start trying to edit it's block diagrams (I really need to convince the SciLab team to do something about that).
There's three classes of stuff on the CD: A SciLab install, SciLab code that generates many of the figures in the book, and incidentally provides examples of using SciLab, and a bunch of C code from chapters 9 and 10. The C code from chapter 9 is sample code for implementing swept-sine frequency response measurements from within the controller. The C code from chapter 10 is a set of code for implementing fractional arithmetic, plus a set of useful control system blocks implemented for integer arithmetic, fractional arithmetic, and floating point arithmetic. One could take my sample code and use it as library code for the core of a controller.
Jerry mentioned looking at other things I've written -- if you look at my website you'll see many articles which directly contributed to the book. "Z Transforms for the Embedded System Engineer" became the seed from which the z transforms chapter and the design chapter grew. "Measuring Frequency Response" produced the chapter on measuring frequency response. "Using Block Diagrams in Control System Design" grew into the block diagrams chapter. "Controlling Motors in the Presence of Friction and Backlash" is in the "Nonlinear Control" chapter, along with a bunch of other stuff.
There isn't a word in there that's lifted from "PID Without a PhD", but I did make darn sure that the design chapter covered PID design.
Perversity? It certainly is a PITA. If you check out my web site there are a number of articles that _aren't_ linked to embedded.com, and which put the figures in the text so you can have a chance at seeing them in the right place.
You guys really are tight wads. If you take even one idea from a book, it is a bargain. I just got back from CA where Tim's book was released. I usually buy at least one book every time I travel to Silicon Valley or San Franscisco. One year I spent $900 on 9 books.
I am happy to report that I have helped Tim move up the best sellers list. I have an autographed first edition and printing of Tim's book. Someday, when Tim is even more famous, I will sell it for a huge profit.
For the moment, we can all be content that we are helping Tim with his Porsche payments. I'm sure we will all see him on late night TV soon.
My suggestion to everyone is, buy Tim's book. You'll be able to tell everyone, you know a famous author! If you also buy Rick Lyon's book, you will know at least two famous authors. This will probably make you very popular and some of you will now be able to date beautiful women that you couldn't even talk to before.
LOL. It's not quite as lucrative as all that. I calculate that if I write another two books (not counting the one that's in edit right now) and all of them continue to sell at the rate of the first one, the quarterly royalties will cover my rent. That's about six years' work, by the way.
Merely being an engineer is the ultimate sexual stimulant to all the members of the opposite sex that any engineer ought to care about. If I may quote from the introduction to my third book (and I think I may):
"Both online and in real life, almost every day I see people asking what they need to do in order to become embedded engineers. Some are new graduates, some are still college students, a few are teenagers in high school, and a large minority are hobbyists, hardware technicians or application-level programmers looking to improve their salary prospects and/or diversify their skills in order to avoid the twenty-first century plague of white-collar commoditization.
Why do so many people want to become embedded gurus? The obvious explanation is that young (and not-so-young) programmers and technicians are being lured by the glamorous, high-profile work, easy conditions, relaxed lifestyle and limitless wealth, delivered by adoring crowds, that only embedded engineering can provide. Since none of that last sentence is remotely true, however (I've been working in the field full-time for somewhat more than ten years, and I don't clearly recall the last time I was pelted with cash by an adoring crowd), I can only assume that there is some major marketing campaign in progress and it is drawing people to the embedded field.
This, of course, leads to an intractable moral dilemma. Should existing embedded engineers steer these young hopefuls towards other fields, thereby keeping the pool of fresh embedded talent small, and consulting rates correspondingly lucrative? Or, should we beckon these poor innocents in the door to work on the bottom level, thereby pushing all us embedded guys one step up the pyramid?"
I commensurate with you, Carlos. BUT..., you CAN do something about it:
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Do you think you need MS's office suite? No, you don't:
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NOTHING on my system is purchased and I am using first-rate applications:
database (postgresql) editor (xemacs) version control (subversion), typesetting (TeX/LaTeX) video/music (realplayer 10)
etc., etc.
You can even have your cake and eat it too (if you have a CD of an MS OS):
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in which you can install and operate MS-Windows inside your unix box. Absolutely amazing, and vmserver is FREE (I think...).
I installed FC4 about 2 or 3 months ago and I am elated! Yes, it took a lot of fooling with, but I now have the system of my dreams! I absolute love FC4!
I haven't gone over to Linux yet, but that 320 page book was written entirely in OpenOffice -- and while some of the symbolic math was checked in MathCad (which costs a few $$) all of the numeric processing was done in SciLab for free, and the code examples were developed and tested using Gnu tools under Cygwin.
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