PREFACE

I did not want to write this book . . . honestly.

My first book project began in 1998, titled Lessons In Electric Circuits, and I didn’t call “quit” until
six volumes and five years later. Even then it was not complete, but being an open-source project
it gained traction on the Internet to the point where other people took over its development and
it grew fine without me. The impetus for writing this first tome was a general dissatisfaction with
available electronics textbooks. Plenty of textbooks exist to describe things, but few really explain
things well for students, and the field of electronics is no exception. I wanted my book(s) to be
different, and so they were. No one told me how time-consuming it was going to be to write them,
though!

The next few years’ worth of my spare time went to developing a set of question-and-answer
worksheets designed to teach electronics theory in a Socratic, active-engagement style. This project
proved quite successful in my professional life as an instructor of electronics. In the summer of 2006,
my job changed from teaching electronics to teaching industrial instrumentation, and I decided to
continue the Socratic mode of instruction with another set of question-and-answer worksheets.
However, the field of industrial instrumentation is not as well-represented as general electronics,
and thus the array of available textbooks is not as vast. I began to re-discover the drudgery of
trying to teach with inadequate texts as source material. The basis of my active teaching style was
that students would spend time researching the material on their own, then engage in Socratic-style
discussion with me on the subject matter when they arrived for class. This teaching technique
functions in direct proportion to the quality and quantity of the research sources at the students’
disposal. Despite much searching, I was unable to find a textbook adequately addressing my students’
learning needs. Many textbooks I found were written in a shallow, “math-phobic” style well below
the level I intended to teach to. Some reference books I found contained great information, but
were often written for degreed engineers with lots of Laplace transforms and other mathematical
techniques well above the level I intended to teach to. Few on either side of the spectrum actually
made an effort to explain certain concepts students generally struggle to understand. I needed a
text giving good, practical information and theoretical coverage at the same time.

In a futile effort to provide my students with enough information to study outside of class, I
scoured the Internet for free tutorials written by others. While some manufacturer’s tutorials were
nearly perfect for my needs, others were just as shallow as the textbooks I had found, and/or were
little more than sales brochures. I found myself starting to write my own tutorials on specific topics
to “plug the gaps,” but then another problem arose: it became troublesome for students to navigate
through dozens of tutorials in an effort to find the information they needed in their studies. What
my students really needed was a book, not a smorgasbord of tutorials.

So here I am again, writing another textbook. This time around I have the advantage of wisdom
gained from the first textbook project. For this project, I will not:
• . . . attempt to maintain a parallel book in HTML markup (for direct viewing on the Internet).
I had to go to the trouble of inventing my own quasi-XML markup language last time in an
effort to generate multiple format versions of the book from the same source code. Instead,
this time I will use stock L A TEX as the source code format and regular Adobe PDF format for
the final output, which anyone may read thanks to its ubiquity. If anyone else desires the book
in a different format, I will gladly let them deal with issues of source code translation. Not
that this should be a terrible problem for anyone technically competent in markup languages,
as L A TEX source is rather easy to work with.

• . . . use a GNU GPL-style copyleft license. Instead, I will use the Creative Commons
Attribution-only license, which is far more permissive for anyone wishing to incorporate my
work into derivative works. My interest is maximum flexibility for those who may adapt my
material to their own needs, not the imposition of certain philosophical ideals.

• . . . start from a conceptual state of “ground zero.” I will assume the reader has certain
familiarity with electronics and mathematics, which I will build on. If a reader finds they need
to learn more about electronics, they should go read Lessons In Electric Circuits.

• . . . avoid using calculus to help explain certain concepts. Not all my readers will understand
these parts, and so I will be sure to explain what I can without using calculus. However,
I want to give my more mathematically adept students an opportunity to see the power of
calculus applied to instrumentation where appropriate. By occasionally applying calculus and
explaining my steps, I also hope this text will serve as a practical guide for students who might
wish to learn calculus, so they can see its utility and function in a context that interests them.
There do exist many fine references on the subject of industrial instrumentation. I only wish I
could condense their best parts into a single volume for my students. Being able to do so would
certainly save me from having to write my own! Listed here are some of the best books I can
recommend for those wishing to explore instrumentation outside of my own presentation

• Instrument Engineers’ Handbook series (Volumes I, II, and III), edited by B´ela Lipt´ak – by
far my favorite modern references on the subject. Unfortunately, there is a fair amount of
material within that lies well beyond my students’ grasp (Laplace transforms, etc.), and the
volumes are incredibly bulky and expensive (nearly 2000 pages, and at a cost of nearly $200.00,
apiece!). These texts also lack some of the basic content my students do need, and I don’t
have the heart to tell them to buy yet another textbook to fill the gaps.

• Handbook of Instrumentation and Controls, by Howard P. Kallen. Perhaps the best-written
textbook on general instrumentation I have ever encountered. Too bad it is both long out of
print – my copy dates 1961 – and technologically dated. Like most American textbooks written
during the years immediately following Sputnik, it is a masterpiece of practical content and
conceptual clarity. I consider books like this useful for their presentations of “first principles,”
which of course are timeless.

• Industrial Instrumentation Fundamentals, by Austin E. Fribance. Another great post-Sputnik
textbook – my copy dates 1962.
• Instrumentation for Process Measurement and Control, by Norman A. Anderson. An inspiring
effort by someone who knows the art of teaching as well as the craft of instrumentation. Too
bad the content doesn’t seem to have been updated since 1980.
• Applied Instrumentation in the Process Industries (Volume I), edited by William G. Andrew.
A very clear and fairly comprehensive overview of industrial instrumentation. Sadly, this fine
book is out of print, and much of the material is dated (second edition written in 1979).

• Practically anything written by Francis Greg Shinskey.

Whether or not I achieve my goal of writing a better textbook is a judgment left for others to
make. One decided advantage my book will have over all the others is its openness. If you don’t
like anything you see in these pages, you have the right to modify it to your liking! Delete content,
add content, modify content – it’s all fair game thanks to the Creative Commons licensing. My only
conditions are declared in the license:

you must give me credit for my original authorship, include a
copyright notice, and also include the full text of the Creative Commons license informing readers
of their rights (see Section 3(a)(1) of the License for more detail). What you do with it beyond that
is wholly up to you 2 . This way, perhaps I can spare someone else from having to write their own
textbook from scratch!
This includes selling copies of it, either electronic or print. Of course, you must include the Creative Commons license as part of the text you sell, which means anyone will be able to tell it is an open text and can probably figure out how to download an electronic copy off the Internet for free. The only way you’re going to make significant money selling this text is to add your own value to it, either in the form of expansions or bundled product (e.g. simulation software, learning exercises, etc.), which of course is perfectly fair – you must profit from your own labors. All my
work does for you is give you a starting point.