Book details of 'McGraw-Hill Illustrated Telecommunications Dictionary'

Title	McGraw-Hill Illustrated Telecommunications Dictionary
Author(s)	Jade Clayton
ISBN	0070120633
Language	English
Published	July 1998
Publisher	McGraw-Hill Professional

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Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
This isn't really a telecom dictionary. It's more of a telco dictionary. If you want to find out about the inner workings of your local telephone company, such as what type of bolts they use to fasten wires to telephone poles, then this is the book for you. With over 300 images, you can find out all about strand clamps, body belts, mast clamps, pole attachments, line wrenches, guy hooks, crimp tools, and climbing spurs. OK, it does get a little bit more technical than that. And, of course, for those who don't get to spend their time stringing cable it's interesting to see something about the hardware. But this certainly cannot be considered an indispensible reference. A specialized dictionary is not going to present the variety of definitions of a term that Oxford does, but a number of the entries in this text are extremely limited. Baffle refers only to speaker cones, and ablation simply mentions burning CD-ROMs: both terms have other uses in telecommunications alone. Some listings are so limited as to be useless, such as the entry for BASIC. A number of definitions use specialized terms, like bel and stinger, which are, themselves, not defined in the book. Which brings up another point: I was surprised at the number of fairly closely related telecom terms (like bel) that did not appear anywhere in the work. ("Anywhere" is the most appropriate word to use. A significant number of entries are out of any kind of order that I can determine. In some cases one might think that some specialized sorting is being used, but for the most part it just seems that the ordering was done manually, and not very well.) The reason that I say this is not a telecom dictionary is that telecom usually deals with the more modern technical aspects of telephony, and generally includes data communications as well. On the surface, this book does cover those topics, but, upon examination, this is where the text really falls down. Obviously Clayton is not at all comfortable with computers and that level of technology: the definition of terms like machine language is completely wrong. Well, not completely. The author appears to have obtained some kind of instruction in computers, but has seriously misunderstood. The discussion of error checking is very confusing, and what I can understand of it is incorrect. A number of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters are defined in the book, but all of the binary and hexadecimal representations are wrong because the author does not understand the difference between most significant bits and least significant bits (both terms being included in the listings). When we get down to OC levels, the listings for OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, and OC-192 are *all* defined as being three times the bandwidth of a DS-3 line. The inclusion of illustrations could be an asset to a dictionary. In this case, though, the clearest pictures are, again, those of cabling hardware. Images of racks full of electronic equipment really don't explain anything. As for the simpler devices, there is no particular difference between the picture of the gender changer and the picture of the null modem adapter, and certainly nothing that would explain what they do. Overall, if your specific interest is in the phone company, this might have what you want. It could be particularly suitable for telcos to issue to new employees. For the rest of the telecom community, though, there are other, better, sources, such as Newton's (see reviews), Petersen's (see reviews), and even the US federal government's . copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999
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Book description:

Announcing the only fully illustrated telecommunications dictionary anywhere! Telecom has a language all its own, complete with freshly minted words and acronyms that change daily. Now new employees and old pros can get a handle on the lingo, literally from A to Z. This handy resource is packed with 2,000+ precise definitions that clarify fundamentals and tough concepts. Better yet, it's the only telecom dictionary to provide illustrations and cross references. All acronyms are fully explained and cross-listed, so readers don't have to puzzle over terms like ATM, PCS, or SONET. And because it requires no prior knowledge of topic areas, this dictionary does triple duty as a teaching tool and desktop reference.