101 Things I learned in Engineering School is a funny book for engineers and probably Greek and latin or mind boggling for the rest.

This book is a compilation of 101 interesting factoids that are loosely related to engineering science and practice but which, as stand-alones, are of no particular value to anyone. It's a great bathroom book that will help refresh your physics vocabulary.

The sketches that accompany each entry are too small to be readable on my Android Tablet.

I received a review copy of "101 Things I Learned in Engineering School" by Matthew Frederick, illustrations by John Kuprenas (Three Rivers Press) through NetGalley.com.

Who Knew? I received this book free from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review. Written by John Kuprenas with Matthew Frederick, and published by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group Division of Penguin Random House, LLC New York in 2018, this is a very short book of engineering principles with illustrations designed to teach a few fundamentals to non-engineering readers. Most of the chapters consist of only a single paragraph, but each chapter has at least one illustration in the form of a line drawing or chart/graph.

The book seems to be concentrated more on the principles of civil engineering, as opposed to mechanical, electrical, chemical, computer software, or any other types of engineering. Perhaps this is because it is civil engineering that is the oldest of the engineering branches. It is, as the authors point out, the “grandparent of all engineering.” Engineering has its roots in physics and chemistry, and it goes back as far as 3,000 years BCE.

Some of the facts that the authors tell us in the book are a bit arcane or redundant, but some of them are really useful information. They tell us, for example, that engineering is about problem solving, and not about mathematics and calculations. They explain how all problems are based on familiar concepts and principles, but also that all problems faced by engineers are somewhat unique. We learn the differences between force, stress and strain in Chapter 8. Did you know that, because concrete and steel expand and contract at almost the same rates with changes in temperature, steel-reinforced concrete is a material of choice for much construction in the modern world? If that wasn’t true, how could we keep our constructions standing through the change of seasons — especially in colder climates?

When reading about packaging engineering, we are surprised to learn that softer materials used for padding do not always provide the best protection for shipping fragile items as other, harder materials. That was surprising to me. To the amazement of many American vehicle drivers, we are taught why roundabouts are the safest, most efficient type of intersection, and that friction affects the efficiency of a wheel. The greater the friction, the more the efficiency of a wheel is reduced, and the more heat it produces. But if friction is reduced to zero, a wheel would not roll at all because of an absence of traction. In that case, the wheel would simply slide.

For the competitive shooters who might read this book, the authors explain why accuracy is different from precision. They also discuss variance and bias in a later chapter, but these principles all affect the way that firearms perform. Kuprenas and Frederick explain that there are always trade-offs between lightness and strength, response time vs. noise, quality vs. cost, responsive handling vs. a soft ride, speed vs. accuracy of measurement, design time vs. design quality, etc. Good design engineering does not attempt to maximize every consideration, rather it tries to optimize between alternatives.

Did you know that the primary structural design challenge of a skyscraper is not how to make it withstand the weight loads of such a tall structure, but how to make it withstand the lateral loads that result from wind and earthquakes? I didn’t. I also never thought about some good advice offered to home handymen dealing with electricity being to keep one hand in your pocket. The authors explain why in Chapter 56.

Here is one that will surprise a few people: “Air is a fluid.” In fact, all gasses and liquids are fluids. Also, heat cannot be destroyed, and cold cannot be created. We learn this in Chapter 62, when the authors discuss air conditioners and heat pumps. Speaking of heating and cooling, the earth receives about 50,000 times our total energy need over its fully sunlit area every hour. Unfortunately, given the state of technology today, only about 20% of that energy can be captured and made available to us in a useful form. It appears that solar, alone, might never be feasible as a solution to our energy needs.

Pilots and aircraft mechanics are well-aware of the old advice that a crack (usually in aluminum) can be stopped by drilling a round hold at it end. Usually, the crack will stop spreading if this is done correctly. It’s called “drill stopping.” Also, and this certainly relates to aircraft, as well, the center of gravity of an object is the point on which it will balance. The term “centroid” is also defined by the authors.

All in all, I liked this small, easy read. If you have any interest at all in what engineers must know in order to practice their profession, read this book. I would have liked it much more, however, if it had covered electrical, mechanical, chemical and computer engineering in a bit more depth. Most of it is not addressed at all in this book, which perhaps should have been titled: 101 Things I Learned in Civil Engineering School.

I read about 37 percent of the book. It is interesting, and as a Mechanical Engineer I recognized a lot of the concepts. In the kindle version I got, it was difficult to see the graphic illustrations. I did learn a few new ideas, thus the 4 starts. But I did not give the last star because I don't think the explanation of the Kansas Hyatt hotel walkway collapse was explained very clearly; and it seemed that the stress/strain information "things" conflicted from one "thing" idea to another. Perhaps I've just been out of school too long. I won't claim to be the "smartest engineer reviewing this book".

A wonderful book, easily accessible to anyone even if you have no science or engineering background. Its pleasant, straightforward and well illustrated.

The best part about this is that it relates engineering to everyday life the reader can relate to easily.
I would recommend this book to anyone who has any interest whatsoever in engineering, design, mathematics, or science or for anyone who has ever wondered why buildings stay up and machines keep running.

101 Things I Learned in Engineering School was a fun read. Learned a lot!

This book is great for people who love engineering and want to remind themselves of engineering principles. The content is brief and summarizes enough for a whole undergraduate degree. As someone with 3 engineering degrees, I really enjoyed it for light browsing and would recommend it to people who like to think about technical things in their spare time. Unfortunately, I thought the pictures were a little small and hard to read. Hopefully they fix it in the final proof.

A very brief 45-minute read, the book collects 101 observations about engineering, each consisting of a diagram or drawing, a title, and (in most cases) a bit of explanatory text. The observations range from the practical, such as distinguishing the meaning of "stress" and "strain," to the ethical, such as responsibility for the environment. A few deal with famous engineering failures that killed people, such as bridge and building collapses or airline crashes, and why they occurred.

Starting from the premise that explaining what engineering is would be best illuminated by explaining what engineers do and how they think, the book uses its eclectic mix of observations to give the impression of a Powerpoint presentation from a working engineer that bounces rapidly from subject to subject. There is a strong but not exclusive bias toward civil engineering, emphasized in the very first observation: "Civil engineering is the grandparent of all engineering." Much is also made of what is usually called "process engineering."

The most serious problem with the book is its extreme brevity, as the author clearly has a well-formed and carefully thought-out philosophy of engineering that is struggling to escape the confines of 101 tiny bite-size chunks. I suspect that the author has it in him to write a compelling narrative essay following on the path of such classics as "To Engineer is Human" by Henry Petroski, but this isn't it.

Overall, the book might be interesting to a curious non-engineer or someone considering engineering as a career, such as an intelligent high school student or college freshman. As a gift, it would be much better from an engineer to a non-engineer than the reverse. Most actual engineers would probably find the content accurate but disappointingly obvious.