To Engineer Is Human
The Role of Failure in Successful Design

If we wanted to design machines and structures that never failed, cars would last fifty years yet cost half a million dollars. There would be no DC-10's falling from the sky, but people couldn't afford to travel in them. But nature, indifferent engineering and excessive innovation sometimes throw us......more

Perhaps I rate this too highly. Problem is I love technology and its issues and Petroski is one of my favorite writers on civil engineering. On the 50th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge, May 27, 1987, almost 1,000,000 people showed up to celebrate and to walk across a bridge that was designed u......more

O livro tem uma ideia central muito boa: grande obras de engenharia, grandes feitos da tecnologia ou da construção não surgem sem erros. E é a análise desses erros que mais informa sobre por onde podemos avançar. Mas é uma ideia central prolongada demais, revisitada e apresentada de muitas formas di......more

There was a lot of good information here, but too much repetition. Petroski was a college engineering teacher & must have had a lot of very dimwitted students over the years. Often the overall points were so overburdened with examples that I almost missed them. I'd recommend this in text format rath......more

A very well-written book that explains a lot about engineering in terms non-engineers can easily understand. This book is full of simple explanations that shed light on things I thought I knew, as well as informing me of many things I did not previously know. To give one example, I had read before a......more