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The RF In RFID
EN-Genius Reviewer: Dennis L Feucht
by Daniel M Dobkin, Published by Newnes Elsevier
ISBN 13: 978-0-7506-8209-1, paperback with CD, 504 pp, $59.95, September 2007
This book is subtitled Passive UHF RFID in Practice and lives up to it. As part of the Newnes Communications Engineering series, it clearly shows the author's extensive experience and a mastery of the subject matter. The presentation of material is about right for most working engineers, with adequate theoretical background and mathematics. Because he knows his subject, the author is able to explain it simply and intuitively. Beginning with basic principles common to the understanding of electronics engineers, he builds simple, approximate models of, for instance, the patch antenna, then extends them from an understood starting point. It is a good book for non-communications engineers wanting to learn about radio generally, though the focus is on RFID.
RFID antennas are covered at some length later in this book while it begins with an overview of what RFID is, covers basic schemes at a system level of explanation, then dives into the substantial topic of radio basics for UHF RFID. There is enough of this in the book, and covered well, to consider it a good text on radio circuits. Radio principles are followed by coverage of RFID readers, then tags, and after that, reader and tag antennas. The rest of the book, starting on page 361, is about the higher-level protocols of RFID: data packets, message formats, and even tag networking. The Appendix covers radio regulations, an intrinsically boring topic to the engineering mind, done least painfully. More Appendices review some basic theory assumed in the main text.
This book can be used as a teaching textbook, for it contains a substantial collection of problems at the end of each chapter. The CD contains book illustrations in full color, animations, and the source code for oneTagWorld. This book, like all the other Newnes books (and beyond) has that computer-graphics style to it that has become the contemporary look in technical books. Illustrations are large, clear, and easy to read.
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