Blip, Ping, and Buzz: Making Sense of Radar and Sonar

This is a great introduction to the subject of remote sensing. It is such a big topic, but this book does an excellent job of giving a complete overview with a good amount of scientific detail. I feel like I am in a good place to dive into the areas of the subject relevant to my interests and I was just flailing around the topic before this book.

I would agree with the other good reviews. This book is just at the right level for me. Not simplistic. But not a text book for radar engineers either. An enjoyable read. Provides good intuition behind the science of radar and sonar. And provides good stories to illustrate the pertinence of the theory.

Excellent overview and historical insight

This was a very entertaining and enlightening book to read. This goes well beyond the "a wave goes out, reflects and comes back" explanation of radar and sonar. In fact, looking at the Wikipedia entry for Radar, you get an outline of the radar subjects in this book. But this book will be more fun and will explain far better what those words mean. You will learn some of the language of signal processing and have it well illustrated in text and simple figures. He does sonar as well, and the wonderful MB800 signal processor seems to be a favorite. That last part may sound dull, but trust me, it is not!Denny does some history, most notably of the British Chain Home radar that helped win the Battle of Britain. He also has a nice section on electronic warfare, with a history of the back and forth between the British and the Germans in World War II.If you've wondered about the side-scan sonar images in Bob Ballard's stories of hunting for ships, there is a readable description of how that works.I'll say that it will help you if you read the technical notes at the end of the book. You won't be faced with pages and pages of algebra or a slew of acronyms. Just very good writing

Books on technical subjects can be broadly divided into three main categories: (i) very basic in its descriptions with many historical and biographical snippets but with no mathematics or formulas, (ii) significantly more advanced in technical content with formulas - a possible supplement to a textbook on the subject, and (iii) very advanced such as a textbook or a research paper. I would place this book in the second category. The author's expertise in this field is very obvious through the clarity with which the principles behind radar and sonar are explained. Technical notes at the back of the book, 23 of them, provide more in-depth information for the interested reader on certain technical details. Remote sensing by bats, dolphins and whales is also discussed. The writing style is clear, friendly, authoritative, very witty - a most pleasant feature in a technical book, and quite accessible, although some passages need serious concentration. I learned quite a bit from reading this book but I would benefit even more from re-reading certain sections since this subject, at this level of technical detail, is so new to me. This book would likely of most interest to science buffs.

Technical books for the general reader must balance effectively accuracy, depth, and complexity on the one hand and readability at several levels on the other. This book succeeds at doing that about as well as any I have ever read, and I read a lot of books that try. The reader can use the numerous appendices to go into as much technical detail (within limits, this is an intro) as s(he) wants while the general discussion illuminates the mechanics and brief history of radar and sonar as well as the always-fascinating means by which bats, dolphins and whales do it better than we do. The author knows his material cold, but in addition, he makes it extremely accessible and pleasant to read. For those who want more, he provides plenty of pointers to plenty more. He's the kind of guy, you decide at the end, you would love to run into at the coffee shop for more conversation.

I have not finished it yet, but am very impressed so far. It could be subtitled "a systems engineer's introduction to sonar and radar". It is conceptually rich and mathematically light, and I have not read such a clear introduction before.