Bookshelf: Business Books for the Executive's Nightstand

Telecommunications and Data Communications Handbook, by Ray Horak, is a thoroughly researched and comprehensive survey of telecom and datacom technologies and services, from the most basic to the most complex. The book begins with basic concepts and definitions and marches through the full ranges of transmission media and voice, data, and video systems, networks, standards and protocols. Horak sets the technologies in context, providing an excellent level of detail on the origin and evolution of fiber optics, cellular radio, digital carrier systems, TCP/IP, and the Internet, as examples. While written for a reasonably astute academic and professional readership, Horak develops each topic in plain English and in such a commonsense and patient manner that the book is equally informative and useful to a student or relative newcomer to telecommunications. We think that anyone with a compelling need for a complete and accurate understanding of telecommunications can benefit from it.

Webster’s New World Telecom Dictionary, also by Ray Horak, includes more than 4,600 terms essential to a clear and complete understanding of voice, data, video, and multimedia communications system and network technologies, applications, and regulations. Although the book is an excellent technical dictionary, Horak‘s plain-English, commonsense style yields definitions that are as thoroughly understandable to the business professional or student as they are to the electrical engineer. It is thoroughly researched, highly objective, absolutely accurate, and includes just about every essential term, phrase, abbreviation, acronym, backronym, contraction, initialism, and portmanteau you might encounter in the telecom and datacom domains. Actually, the title is a bit understated, as Webster’s New World Telecom Dictionary is not only a comprehensive telecom and datacom dictionary, but also defines a great deal of terminology from the domain of computers and computing. Many entries are encyclopedic in nature, discussing applications and issues, as well as technical specifics.

These books are absolutely fantastic! The fact that I wrote them has nothing to do with this totally objective evalution. There is, however, an obvious flaw in the blog format, as it apparently is unedited. May the force be with us!

Ray Horak of WA 12:13AM May 09, 2008