1) The book is "fair", but not what I expected. I was hoping for more of a practical review of the current industrial state of the art and more about practical and real problems, (the Taiwan subway vibration issue for fabrication for example) This book is more a summary of the research that they have done in their motion control laboratory.

If you are interested in 'research' on motion control, including issues with friction models, auto-tuning, and permanent magnet linear motors for X-Y control platforms, using dSPace controllers and applying radial basis functions to approximate nonlinearities, then this book is for you.

2) The book was published in 2001, but as with most items, it can only cover a limited area and because it is based on research over time, it is already out of date. For example, it doesn't even mention piezoelectric motors (see p. 33 of the Dec. 2001 issue of Sensors magazine).

3) I could have done without the short section about monitoring over the internet via LabView.

4) Had the book included a CDROM with the Matlab/Simulink models used in parts of their simulated analysis, then the book would have been more useful, but I image they don't want to give those developments away for free.

5) I was surprised that the book didn't mention thermal effects or structural rigidity, considering they were taking about control accuracy on the order of 1 micrometer. They did discuss vibration and monitoring and using an adaptive notch filter.

Not a bad book. Some of the results the present were impressive, errors less than 20 micrometers while performing slow sinusoidal trajectories over 10 centimeters. But the research focus is not up my alley. I won't be making space for this book on my bookshelf.