The Internet of Things, revised and updated edition (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) Paperback – 24 Aug. 2021

I bought this along with a few other volumes in the MIT Essential Knowledge series in an attempt to buff up (or bluff up) my understanding of contemporary technology. This one is about the way devices (which may contain sensors, processors, software and other technologies) are being connected together to exchange data and share information in a fashion which is changing how we live and work. It's an idea that's been around for a while (the book was first published in 2015, and this updated edition appeared in 2021) and this tries to give an account of the evolving digital technologies - including the blockchain distributed ledger system which helps protect data transfers from error and violation - that have come together to make these connections possible, along with a survey of its applications which have become embedded in, for example, smart phones and watches.I found the book fairly interesting and timely (I've just started driving a car which appears to contain much of this technology, for example), but found I was becoming distracted by the way a number of things were repeated and many examples appeared to have been incorporated uncritically, and looked more like advertisements - for example, "At the forefront of this technology innovation is a company called Kinsa", which make devices called "thermal thermometers" [sic, p46]. Other topics were listed without explanation so that they looked like jargon (e.g. "the network and physical layer may incorporate IEEE 802.15.4 for personal area networks, Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n) and Ethernet and cellular technologies such as GSM, CDMA, LTE and 5G" [p57]), and there were a few cases of the cart being put before the horse - e.g. edge computing (where data storage and processing has been moved closer to the device which generates the data) is first discussed on p80, after edge AI has been introduced on p40.As is often the case with books of this kind, I began to wonder whether its story could have been more usefully delivered in a magazine article (and/or whether it had been assembled from a collection of articles, with insufficient attention paid to overlap or repetition). The writing looks like hackwork in places - e.g. its opening sentence is "It's incredibly easy to overlook the impact of any given technology on our world", and that paragraph ends with "This ushered in massive changes in how people act ... and interact" [p ix]. And, towards the end, we're told "For better or for worse - and it can sometimes be both simultaneously - technology adds an abstraction layer between a natural event and a person" [p209], which I don't think makes sense at all.So: an useful exposition of an interesting topic, from which I found I was too easily distracted.

This small paperback is an easy to read introduction to IoT concepts and how IoT can be used industrially and commercially. Although the writing is accessible, I found its lack of depth to be a drawback, with concepts not being covered in sufficient detail to understand how they work or why they are adopted. Overall, a reasonable, brief overview; but a little too light for students or business professionals wanting to understand the concepts of IoT or what options might need to be explored for IoT development.