Book Review: An elementary guide to reliability (5th edition), G. W. A. Dummer, M. H. Tooley and R. C. Winton, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1997. 94pp. £9.99
✍ Scribed by P. D. T. O'Connor
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1997
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 14 KB
- Volume
- 13
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0748-8017
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The fifth edition does nothing to redeem what is a grossly oversimplified, incomplete, outdated and naı ¨ve treatment of the subject. For example, there are not even simple descriptions of FMECA or FTA, testing, non-constant failure rates, or data analysis. The treatment of topics that are covered, for example mechanical reliability, reliability costs and reliability prediction, is woefully inadequate, even for a book that is supposed to present an 'elementary guide'. Much of the limited page count is taken up by a long list of definitions, most of which do not relate to the material covered in the book.
The subject of engineering reliability is too important to be treated so trivially.