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Fundamentals of Global Positioning System Receivers: A Software Approach (Wiley Series in Microwave and Optical Engineering) Review by Aaron Morton
Wait for a revised 2nd edition
Lets face it, there are plenty of GPS textbooks on the market that satisfy all levels of inquiry.
My first criticism of the book is that the first six chapters are well covered in most of the standard texts. I believe that the primary reason someone would want to purchase this book is for the last few chapters, (particularly chapter 9 which discusses GPS software receivers), as well as for the accompanying Matlab source code in the textbook. (At least that was my reason).
My second criticism is that this book desperately needs an editor. There are a tremendous number of grammatical errors and spelling errors that I found incredibly distracting from the contents of the book. In addition, many of the illustrative plots used in the text have no units specified for the axes, and little description of the figures is given in the body of the text.
Finally, the code that is included at the end of each chapter is poorly organized and poorly documented. There are very few comments in the various code sections and the author insists on using terribly ambiguous variable names. All of which could be forgiven if the Matlab code provided actually worked!! Many of the routines in the all-important 9th chapter on GPS software receivers call user-defined functions that are not actually defined anywhere in the textbook! In an attempt to be proactive, I emailed the author and asked for a copy of the missing Matlab code and was told that the codes are not available for download.
Disappointing indeed! (I think that an accompanying CD with a snippet of IF data and a set of working Matlab codes would be a wonderful addition to a 2nd edition of the book.)For what its worth, I think the approach taken in the textbook is great, but until a revised 2nd edition of the textbook is produced I would recommend that you save your money.