Engineering in Plain Sight: An Illustrated Field Guide to the Constructed Environment

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Well that’s a delightful read. I relatively recently came across the Practical Engineer YouTube Channel, where he goes into a whole pile of various civil engineering and other infrastructure topics. This is a ‘Bob the Builder’ guide for young adults and older who are curious about common miracles of engineering. From asphalt to voltage regulators, they’ll never look at the world the same.” The #1 New York Times bestselling author of What If? and How To answers more of the weirdest questions you never thought to ask This book has A LOT of well done illustrations, and if you look closely they are often amusing. Because there are so many illustrations I do not recommend reading this on a Kindle. I normally prefer reading on my Kindle, but was glad I had the hardcover of this book. Grady is the perfect person to explain engineering to us . . . he's a brilliant storyteller who can translate that knowledge into engaging tales that even the technically-challenged among us can dig into. His book [ Engineering in Plain Sight] is the perfect extension of this unique skill set. By taking a concept usually applied to the natural world - a field guide! - and applying it to the, um, non-natural one, he's helped me understand for the first time basic but important things ... like how a cell tower actually works."

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The book aims to explain (mostly in layman's terms) how numerous infrastructural objects around us work. And it accomplishes it brilliantly, in my opinion. It provides just enough details to explain most ideas and doesn't dive into intricacies to not get you bored.

This book offers an overview of utilities (electricity, water, comms), transportation (rail, roads) and some of the most vital structures (bridges, dams, coastal infrastructure), supplementing the text with good illustrations. Author covers a broad range of topics, but doesn't go in-depth on them, making the book seem more geared towards younger readers. It appears rather superficial, but would probably be enough to get someone uninitiated interested in civil engineering. In the tradition of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens, a winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books shows h ow four tools enabled has us humans to control the destiny of our species Quantum physicist, New York Times bestselling author, and BBC host Jim Al-Khalili offers a fascinating and illuminating look at what physics reveals about the worldI like this one, but also felt that I would love it way more if I read it my teens. The book is pretty good at covering the basics of civil engineering, but it stops right there - at the basics. (at each chapter it felt that the same topics are covered way more detailed on the youtube channel) I kinda wished there were links or references to the resources if I would want a deeper dive. Highly readable and illustrated with plenty of diagrams, making the material accessible to non-engineers . . . it would serve very well as a reference book for classrooms and the school library.” By publishing your document, the content will be optimally indexed by Google via AI and sorted into the right category for over 500 million ePaper readers on YUMPU. A wonderful explanation of all sorts of engineering practices. Author Grady Hillhouse is quite thorough as he give clear explanations to everything that engineers must design and deal with. It was still pretty useful now, when I have no little one asking me questions, except for my own 4-year old self that is still inside my head wondering, occasionally, what all this stuff is. The great thing about a young one asking you questions, of course, is that it helps you to remember to look around and think about these things again, and now that there are more books available than ever, you can more often than not find out the answer.