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A review by kimscozyreads
To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design by Henry Petroski
4.0
Great book; only reason I'm deducting a star is that it feels redundant at times (even though that's usually a good thing in engineering) and sometimes runs off on tangents that don't feel incredibly relevant.
It explains technicam mechanisms of failure for several notable cases very well and taught me a lot of history I was totally unaware of in the development of modern structures. It also spoke quite a bit about metallurgy, which made me happy. Mention of issues like our loss of the sense of significant figures since the calculator replaced the slide rule seem important to me, and I understand better why sig figs were discussed a lot in my introductory classes now; I don't have the awareness of them that engineers who came up working on slide rules do, and my computer programs won't have it either unless I write them to address that. Anyway, overall still a great book and not too long.
It explains technicam mechanisms of failure for several notable cases very well and taught me a lot of history I was totally unaware of in the development of modern structures. It also spoke quite a bit about metallurgy, which made me happy. Mention of issues like our loss of the sense of significant figures since the calculator replaced the slide rule seem important to me, and I understand better why sig figs were discussed a lot in my introductory classes now; I don't have the awareness of them that engineers who came up working on slide rules do, and my computer programs won't have it either unless I write them to address that. Anyway, overall still a great book and not too long.