However, if you’ve used any of the three editions of The Art of Electronics with success, I’d recommend the x-Chapters without hesitation. While it’s not the beginner book that was requested, I suspect “Troubleshooting Analog Circuits” by the late Bob Pease can come right alongside “The Art of Electronics”. I suspect that just as importantly though, the time needed to publish these chapters would have allowed the rest of the information updated in AoE3 to stagnate for 4 years.

It makes one aware of how to do design, for example, a common emitter amplifier, as if it's a piece of cake. Go for an easier one to start with, such as Practical Electronics for Inventors, book 4, and Learning the Art of Electronics then drift into this superb volume.This is great if you’re an even somewhat experienced designer looking for some from-the-trenches experience on a specific topic, but maybe less useful for the beginner — more about that later. For some reason, I almost didn’t recognise it by the title on teh interwebs for several mentions until I got used to it, it sticks in my mind and heard it referred to in real life as “Horowitz and Hill” . Learning the Art of Electronics: A Hands-On Lab Course - (formerly Student Manual for The Art of Electronics) by Thomas C.

As director of the institute's Electronics Engineering Lab he has designed some 500 scientific instruments. There are further excursions into lands less traveled, like the discussion of a two-terminal negative resistance made from BJTs, another obscure subject close to my heart. There are also application circuits for measuring MOSFET gate charge and FET transconductance, with tabulated results for a variety of types. It’s really too bad that they don’t teach more about circuits design and manipulation in undergrad as it is more applicable to a lot of jobs.This is Hackaday-type stuff; if it were’t already in a book, their work would fit right in as a daily article here. So, having had the book in hand — almost continuously — for a few days, I think I’ve got a decent idea of what it’s all about.

Or, if not a lie, it at least sets you up for an extremely steep learning curve, not helped any by the authors' annoying habit of using concepts long before they're introduced, and you very much do already need to have a solid enough grounding (haha) in electricity to be able to read circuit diagrams (there's an appendix about them but it's about how to draw good ones rather than bad ones, not fundamentals) and to have some familiarity with how it behaves: though the first chapter starts with Ohm's law and the concept of the electron, it skips over a pretty significant middle bit as it throws you into the deep end. If you do have the assumed background (whether you're a hobbyist breadboard toucher or a trained electrical engineer), The Art of Electronics is a great and extremely practical gap-filler, refresher course, and reference work for everything from simple analog circuits to modern computers. In addition to having examples of effective practices in circuit design, the book also demonstrates and explains common pitfalls in circuit design.This 'application perspective' is most evident in their presentation: the material is presented with the goal of understanding the behavior of electronic devices, circuits, and systems before the nitty-gritty details of calculating the behaviour … The authors are also liberal in their use of commercially available parts in their presentation, something rarely, if ever, seen in a typical textbook. This new book features expanded coverage of topics from the previous editions, plus discussions of some interesting but rarely traveled areas of electrical engineering. My only ‘twinge’ is that it discloses and explains (in glorious graphical detail and with real part numbers) many topics that I thought were my personal trade secrets. This book favors an intuitive understanding over the endless math found in electrical engineering textbooks.

If you can have an 'open book' exam, allowing you to bring a book in with you, then you need to have in-depth knowledge of this book prior to this, but its a great help if you know your way around it already. Generally if I’m doing something at the level of transistors and diodes I always feel like I could be doing a much better product by using ICs. In the first paragraph of the book’s preface, the authors give the basic picture: the “x” is for eXtra, meaning that the material in this book was originally slated to be part of the AoE3, but simply didn’t fit — that book is 1250 pages as it stands. I had AoE1 on unofficial permaloan from my high school library in the late eighties until I received the AoE2 as my ‘big’ Christmas gift from my parents in 1990.As for out-of-the-way topics, there’s one page on low-voltage boost converters for energy harvesting — they present a simple circuit that starts up at a supply voltage of 20 mV and runs down to 10 mV. Chapter 5 details every circuit artifact that I’ve encountered in the past 30 years in a thorough, pragmatic, and straightforward way.