The Art of Electronics
by Paul Horowitz, Winfield Hill
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Book Summary Information
Author: Paul Horowitz, Winfield HillEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1989-07-28
ISBN: 0521370957
Number of pages: 1152
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Book Reviews of The Art of Electronics
Book Review: Confusing to a beginner
Summary: 1 Stars
I have a copy of the first edition of this book. I bought it very cheaply from a second hand shop and it was fortunate of me to have done so.
1. This is not a beginner's book. If you are really interested in electronics, this book will make you despair and leave you believing you must be stupid because you are unable to grasp what the authors claim are obvious. It is not your fault really. It's the book's.
The authors try to dispense with the mathematics and the circuit theorems but electronics is not an intuitive subject and plenty of details and results get lost without the math.
For example: It is not intuitive that current will find the path of least resistance when there are so many paths to choose from. (How does the electron know?) The current knows where it will go, but you, gentle reader will need math to tell you this. (H&H also fails to tell you that though electrons carry the charges in a current, the current is moving in the other direction! You'll be rightly confused by this omission.)
Another: You will not learn from this book that when analyzing circuits with diodes and powered by alternating currents, you need to analyze two different circuits: one circuit for the situation when current is flowing through the diode and another circuit for when the diode is non-conducting. Unfortunately, determining the conditions under which a diode conducts and when it does not conduct requires math or the years of experience possessed by the authors.
Despite what H&H claim, you do need mathematics (college algebra and basic calculus) if you want to learn enough electronics to be able to design circuits. Dispensing with circuit theorems and characteristic equations will mean you will be able to assemble electronic kits and solder components with the help of a schematic, but you won't be able to do much designing yourself.
2. Many reviewers claim that this is an indispensable book in their shelf and score it with four or five stars. However, note that most of them have been doing electronics for years before they bought this book. Clearly, they didn't learn electronics from this book but elsewhere.
3. At least one reviewer who gave the book five stars did not really understand some of the material at all. There is a challenge problem in the book where the reader is given some physical properties of a conductive material (aluminum wire as I recall it) and then asked to compute by how much the temperature in the wire will increase if several thousand volts of electricity is sent through it.
The catch in the problem is that when you plug in the values they gave into the equation they have provided, you will compute something absurd. Your computation will show that it is impossible to send 30,000 volts of electricity down the wires from New Jersey to New York without vaporizing the wire in an instant. Since wires carry 30,000 volts of electricity from New York to New Jersey everyday without mishap, there is clearly something amiss in the computations. The authors ask the reader explain what happened.
The reviewer who gave the book five stars answered that you don't just send 30,000 volts of electricity down the wire but you must use multiple cables and power supplies. His answer is clearly wrong! Since the book does not provide answers to questions it poses he can be forgiven for thinking he has the right answer.
The correct answer to the trick problem is that plugging in the values given into the equation provided implies a situation where the wire is short-circuited to ground! We don't need an equation to tell us what will happen there. The energy output of the power station is expended on heating up the wire and it vaporizes instantly. (If you don't understand what I just said you better keep away from H&H.)
Obviously, the said reviewer did not learn much from the discussion about the voltage divider. He also failed to understand what a power supply's job is in a circuit. If a five-star reviewer did not take away much knowledge from his encounter with Horowitz and Hill, one must be dubious of claims that H&H delivers the goods as it should.
4. To keep the mathematics and the physics to a minimum, Horowitz and Hill had to resort to spoon feeding. In several instances, they will show the characteristics of a circuit without explaining all the required details of its operation. The reader is just supposed to believe that this is what will happen and to take their word for it. One such example is the diode rectifier circuit I mentioned above. This is fine if one loves being spoon fed information but very frustrating to a serious learner unable to verify the assertions.
There are reasons electrical and electronics engineering are some of the most math-heavy subjects out there. Maybe if you have solved so many circuit problems via Kirchoff's Laws you can understand many of the shortcuts the authors are talking about. But for a rank beginner? Probably not. You won't learn much from this book unless you have a proper textbook near you.
In summary, my recommendations are:
(a) Not to buy this book if you wish to understand electronics in detail. My recommendation is that you find yourself (from second-hand markets) textbooks used by students of electronics and electrical engineering.
(b) Not even buy this book as a reference. There are better and more encyclopedic reference books for practicing engineers out there with titles like Electronics and Electrical Engineers Reference Manual, Op Amp Reference Manual, etc.
Summary of The Art of Electronics
This is the thoroughly revised and updated second edition of the hugely successful The Art of Electronics. Widely accepted as the authoritative text and reference on electronic circuit design, both analog and digital, this book revolutionized the teaching of electronics by emphasizing the methods actually used by circuit designers -- a combination of some basic laws, rules of thumb, and a large bag of tricks. The result is a largely nonmathematical treatment that encourages circuit intuition, brainstorming, and simplified calculations of circuit values and performance. The new Art of Electronics retains the feeling of informality and easy access that helped make the first edition so successful and popular. It is an ideal first textbook on electronics for scientists and engineers and an indispensable reference for anyone, professional or amateur, who works with electronic circuits.Engineering Books
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