It was very exciting to have all of this knowledge available, easy to understand and made it fun too.

It was very exciting to have all of this knowledge available, easy to understand and made it fun too.

This book served as a nice introduction to fuels cells. It explains the basic concepts and how to build your own simple fuel cells without getting overly technical. It covers a lot of the different fuel cells types. I had previously only known about PEM and methanol fuel cells and this book has interested me into doing further research on microbial fuel cells.

My one issue with the book is with the part numbers listed for items from Fuel Cell Store (which the author mentioned working with to write this book). The part numbers listed were not always able to be found on the website. The alkaline fuel cell from the book is one example, it is no longer available from the store. I was able to find the manufacturer's website and they said they are no longer making it. For a book that was just published this seemed odd and these errors should been caught during proofreading. These errors are more of an issue with the earlier chapters and with experiments that most people are probably going to skip anyway to get to the more interesting ones.

This book served as a nice introduction to fuels cells. It explains the basic concepts and how to build your own simple fuel cells without getting overly technical. It covers a lot of the different fuel cells types. I had previously only known about PEM and methanol fuel cells and this book has interested me into doing further research on microbial fuel cells.

My one issue with the book is with the part numbers listed for items from Fuel Cell Store (which the author mentioned working with to write this book). The part numbers listed were not always able to be found on the website. The alkaline fuel cell from the book is one example, it is no longer available from the store. I was able to find the manufacturer's website and they said they are no longer making it. For a book that was just published this seemed odd and these errors should been caught during proofreading. These errors are more of an issue with the earlier chapters and with experiments that most people are probably going to skip anyway to get to the more interesting ones.

This text provides an exceptionally low level of information on a rather diverse and exciting field. I realize that I am probably not the target audience of this work, but it really could have stood to add some information digestible above the 8th-grade reading level. Secondarily, it reads like a product catalog for [...] with poorly written "projects" attached to the product descriptions.

I realize that a two star rating on Amazon.com is a rather scathing appraisal, but I feel it is appropriate in this case. I understand that this is a recently released book, indeed my copy is a first edition. Even considering that, this book should have never made it into print in its current condition. Typos and blatant errors infest the entire work. Captions are attached to the wrong pictures, pictures have text cut off of them, in fact entire paragraphs repeat the same information contained in the previous paragraph. Frankly it speaks to me of markedly poor copy editing (or in my opinion, no editing whatsoever) and provides a fine example of the failure of companies like McGraw-Hill to continue their production of quality material.

The book shows the principles behind fuel cell devices using interesting experiments. It presents, for my surprise, a procedure to make a membrane electrode assembly using home avaliable equipaments. It has a rigorous scientific aproach about the theme (hydrogen and fuel cells) but using an understandable way to show it over the text. I really recommend this book for teachers to initiate their students into the fascinating world of fuel cells