Book review [review of "Principles of Modern Radar - Basic Principles (Richards, M.A., Eds, et al; 2010)]

This book is the first in a series of three volumes. It is presented in four sections: Overview, External Factors, Subsystems, and Signal and Data Processing. The book leads the reader through a logical development sequence of this complex topic by introducing radar theory and concepts, explaining environmental-radar interactions and modeling, illustrating performance calculations, configuring radars, and, finally, delving into all the radar subsystems with particularly comprehensive coverage of digital processing. With the field continuing to evolve, and at times showing revolutionary change, this release fills a gap in current and older radar texts and current, but scattered, reference material. Particularly, extended discussions of digital techniques and advanced treatment of such topics as tracking, integrated with more traditional coverage for completeness, comes at an opportune time. Phased array radars are rapidly integrating more digital electronics into all subsystems, even toward the antenna front end with active arrays. More complex signal and data processing is performing more accurate target detection, tracking, classification, and imagingusing algorithms that further approach known optimal derivations. Enabling these transformations are higher and higher speed digital processing via both custom hardware and radar-specific software in rapidly evolving generalpurpose computers.