telecommunications

Any one who have had an introductory course on electromagnetics may use this book either as a reference for an antenna design or as a perfect learning material. Balanis' clear, informative language, enhanced with many illustrations help the student to understand the subject easily. Due to its wide range of topics, the book is of invaluable help for an antenna designer. The diskette provided with the book includes FORTRAN codes for many practical design problems and frees the reader from complicated formulas. A must have for any enginneer involved in the subject!

I bought this book when I needed to analyze antennas in arrays in and found it very competent and logical. There are many things to like about it:

1. comprehensive coverage of antenna types and analysis techniques

2. Chapter 2 contains a nice compendium of definitions according to IEEE standards, with enough mathematical detail to make it useful in its own right.

3. Good explanations of the material. It's not a cookbook (that's good!). Balanis provides clear text and derivations of the key results, with illustrations. He hasn't watered down the level of sophistication of his topics; they aren't at the research level, but they are fully at the level of the established state of the art.

4) Error-free. I typically wrestle with a few errors or typos in a text as I repeat derivations or perform calcs in the course of my work. I haven't found any errors here so far.

Coverage of the various antenna types is pretty standard. It's in discussions of topics like the Method of Moments, reciprocity, and self- and mutual- impedance, and the method of stationary phase where the book shines--they are clear, easy to follow, with sufficient detail to solve real problems.

Shortcomings of the book are few, but include:

a) sparse or no treatment of advanced topics such as scattering, array implementation, network approach (foster's reaction theorem, relation of mutual coupling to measured scattering parameters), etc.

b) inclusion of Fortran (!) programs for the calculations. Matlab, Mathcad or just plain descriptions would be more useful. Puzzling since one Matlab file is included.

I recommend this book heartily. Engineering practicality and mathematical rigor are balanced nicely. The lack of advanced topic coverage is easily made up by going to specialty texts or the research literature. It worked well for me as a self-study text, and should work for you too.

If you are an upper-level/graduate student who doesn't like derivations (you know who you are), this book is not the greatest choice for you. The way the book is written is very dry and not conducive to staying awake. Reading this (and taking notes) at my own pace, I took three months to wade through Chapter 2! I had to mark several pages with sticky notes to remember to re-read things I didn't understand.

On the other hand, this book has some nice reference information if you are doing computer simulations of antennas, and would like to double-check the results of your models. The graphs and figures were extra helpful. The index generally supports the use of this book as a reference text, although it has failed to identify some very helpful graphs.

Overall, it is a decent book, and I'm glad to have a copy. I've just started reading another antennas book, Antennas For All Applications, 3rd. ed., by John Kraus and Ronald Marhefka, and I find it much easier to read. In one sentence, that book explained radiation resistance in a way that made more sense to me than all the definitions and equations in an entire section of the Balanis text. The layout on each page of the Kraus book was easy on the eyes, with the text in the standard Times New Roman and the Figure captions in an Arial type of font, which made it easier to read.

If you are a student who usually ends up wasting time or dozing off when you try to read your textbook, you'll do the same with this one. If you just need to read a section or two as a reliable reference, this book is fine.