Engineering Safety From Fundamentals to Functional Safety

Safety is the quiet promise
an engineer makes to everyone their work touches.

That the machine will not maim, the plant will not explode, the structure will not fall, and the worker will go home whole at the end of the day. It is the most human of engineering disciplines, because its measure is not profit or performance but harm avoided — the accidents that never happened, the injuries no one suffered, the lives that were never lost.

The book moves from first principles — what a hazard is, how accidents happen — through management systems and human factors to the rigorous mathematics of functional safety, and on to the digital and process frontiers.

Who this book is for

It's written for three readers at once: the student meeting safety engineering formally for the first time; the practising engineer who carries safety responsibilities they were never explicitly taught; and the professional preparing for certification — NEBOSH, IOSH, or functional-safety (TÜV) — who wants the reasoning behind the regulations, not just the regulations. You don't need a safety background to start. Each chapter meets you where you are.

What's inside

Across 20 chapters and 189 pages, organised into six parts that move from first principles to specialised practice:

• The foundations of safety — hazard, risk and harm, accident-causation models (Heinrich, the Domino, Reason's Swiss Cheese), and the hierarchy of controls
• Law, standards, and management systems — the legal duty of care, ISO 45001, and risk-assessment techniques including HAZOP, Bowtie, and LOPA
• Safe systems of work — permits-to-work, lockout/tagout, incident investigation, and safety audits
• Human factors and leadership — safety culture, human failure, just culture, competence, and training
• The engineering hazards — mechanical, electrical, arc flash, fire, explosion, and hazardous atmospheres
• Functional safety — IEC 61508, Safety Integrity Levels, safety instrumented systems, machinery functional safety, and process-safety management

Every chapter follows the same rhythm — objectives, theory and the reasoning behind it, the international standards that govern practice, worked examples, a case study, and a generous bank of four-tier review questions, labs, projects, and certification practice.

Start free — the first two chapters are yours

The opening two chapters, "The Meaning and Evolution of Safety" and "Accident Causation and Safety Philosophies," are the perfect place to begin. The first draws the crucial line between hazard, risk, and harm, and makes the moral, legal, and financial case for prevention. The second walks through the great causation models — and shows why blaming the worker almost always leaves the real danger in place.

They're clear, they're practical, and they'll tell you within twenty minutes whether this book is for you. I'm confident it is.