I am disappointed in this book. I’m an engineer designing distributed Internet of Things (IoT) systems as well as a part-time college instructor, and I was hoping for a future-oriented discussion of the evolution of contextual computing. While the author says he targeted graduate and undergraduate university courses, the book comes across as more of a lab manual. In each of the 11 chapters, there’s an opening paragraph or two on concepts, and then it’s all formulas and charts. It’s a collection of data sheets rather than a structured discussion of context-aware computing. There aren’t enough ideas here to create a useful course.

It disappoints on another level, too. Morgan Kaufmann and Elsevier are prominent publishers. As a college text, these 340 pages would set students back at least $50 a copy. For that price, readers should expect excellent readability, and the book just doesn’t deliver. Subject/verb disagreement, missing articles (a, an, the), awkward grammar and sentence construction, typographical errors--there was apparently little to no proofreading performed on the manuscript (a fault that lies with the publisher, not the author). For example, chapter 2, “Context-aware Computing,” opens with the line: “Let us start by exploring what content means.” Really? No one noticed that the wrong word, “content,” was used in place of “context,” a key word in both the title of the chapter and the title of the book? The whole volume seems rushed, as if Gajjar collected and sorted his data sheets, pasted them together with a little generic text, and then self-published to Kindle. It’s a good first draft, but it’s not a book of any significance.