Understanding Fiber Optics,   ISBN:9780130278289

Customer Rating: 

GREAT BOOK! Used a lot of the principles in my lectures.

Customer Rating: 

A very good starting point. Allows you space to build on what you read.

Customer Rating: 

The fourth edition of this book is a product of many years of practical experience and trials of previous editions. I always wondered if more information than just reader's level as beginner, intermediate and advanced should be printed on the technical books. What you are looking for in a book and level of satisfaction depends on your involvement in that area of expertise. Please stay with me while I try my thinking on this book. If you are already an expert working in Optical Engineering field this book is not a research paper. Probably you need Warren J. Smith's book Modern Optical Engineering. If you are a student learning about Fiber Optics this book has enough information and practice questions to be qualified as a good text book, but may not be enough for your Graduate School research thesis. If you are like me, a practicing Network Engineer or technician, this book provides everything you need to know and more than enough information. It is written in an easy to understand style, and chapters are in a perfect sequence and length. That's why I am rating it 5 Stars.

Customer Rating: 

C.H.L.'s attempt to justify Hecht's misinformation is a bit weak

1. The G.711 recommendation is probably 30+ years old and the US telephone companies have adhered to it since ratification. In fact, G.711 simply confirmed what the US and European companies were already doing so the US telephone companies were using 64Kbps for voice even before G.711.

2. Packet switching has nothing (or very little) to do with voice. Voice is carried via circuit switched channels.

3. When voice is carried via a digital channel in the US (at 64Kbps, I might add), one form of signaling "steals" the low order bit of an 8 bit voice sample of each sixth sample of the 24 channels on a DS-1 (AKA T-1) circuit. Because of this, a data channel carried over one of these 64Kbps channels is only able to provide 56Kbps. Maybe this is where Hecht went wrong.

But don't buy or not buy Hecht's book based on this one error (in the big scheme of things it's fairly small). The real problem with the book is that it just doesn't do a jood job of explaining optical communications. A better defense of Hecht's book might be that Hecht was attempting to write about all of the uses of optical fiber and not just communications.

Customer Rating: 

I personally don't have a rating to this book, however the system is asking me to rate this book with stars or I couldn't post, so I put a 4-star to cope with the current general rating.

As for the possible mistake mentioned in the previous review (December 26, 2000), I think I might have an explaination for the misunderstanding.

Jeff Hecht says that voice is coded in the telephone network with 7 bit samples to give a 56 kbps data stream. The fact is that this is what happens in the US because when the Bell system first installed those packet switching nodes for the packet switched networks around the US. They adopted 56 Kbps clear channels for interconnections, prior to the standard protocol being set up by the international standards bodies.

When the international standard called SS7 was finally completed, AT&T adopted it; however, the legacy of 56 Kbps clear channels remains in the US.

So this is what happened in the US, while the rest of the world is using 64 Kbps clear channels.

FYI.