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.
Stats for nerds
153recommend
328mentions
230people
2008–2026years
65% recommend29% neutral6% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For the amount of marketing and praise this book has gotten, I’m very unimpressed. I don’t mean it to come across snobbish. I just don’t see a take that’s in any way out of the usual.
While I don’t expect one book to teach it all, I would like to see how it compares to the current crop of books and why is it better. The sample chapter left me very unimpressed and the book looks like it’s meant to be more for a coffee table and less for actual hands on usage. I don’t see a way that someone would put this into practice without an accompanying practice/lab book. Otherwise, it reads like trivia that showcases how much the author knows. Great, I guess?
Speaking of covers, Open Circuits: Inner Beauty of Electronics has a much more honest yet intelligent cover to it. Each page is both informational and extremely well done. Someone who has no knowledge of electronics or electricity can walk away learning something because it shows how things physically work with photos. The visual itself is almost self explanatory as a still image of different materials and how they are arranged. In other words, it has information density that’s both attractive and impactful.
My actual picks, are the likes of Floyd or Melvino, the Charles Platt one that has loads of circuits to build, and of course the clumsy but informative Forrest Mims series of books. Then you can get into Elicia White’s Embedded or any other assortment of more advanced books on power electronics etc.
Open to be proven wrong but yeah. I would have expected more because I don’t know of any book on this subject other than Art of Electronics and maybe Microelectronics by Sedra (or Razavi) that gets this much praise. Yet it started getting this praise before it was even released.
Bashing AI is fun except even good old Sam Ben-Yaakov is coming around to appreciate how useful it is to pedagogy.
I remain skeptical.
- I understand and agree with what you just said. What I’m gauging is where is the praise coming from? Who has it taught, and what did they get out of it? Art of Electronics is not one book, it is three - main book, lab book, x chapters. It has taught many people how to think about circuits. It has mileage of many many years that warrants the praise. Also, it was a composition of notes from a full course that had labs, that went into a book format. Meaning its very existence came from teaching students working circuits rather than, as one might assume, “sending diagrams and formulas [their] way”. But it does seem that way if someone tries to open it for the first time. It is a slog and a half.
Take Troubleshooting Analog Circuits by Bob Pease. He throws something janky at you to see if you can intuit what could the culprits be. He then elaborates the ways in which things can go wrong. This is an introductory chapter. Many books do this, it’s not perfect but it works. It’s a book about troubleshooting that starts with asking you to troubleshoot, and then helps you to do so by explaining how and why. Hard to argue with that.
I’m not against the book, but it does seem mostly like trivia. The accompanying blog posts are insightful, though the author spends a lot of time showing how much they know rather than explaining a concept to the student - and yes, there is a difference between the two. There are a number of instances I came across of this, and other texts are better written in this regard. If I didn’t already know the stuff the author is talking about, I would need to read up another resource on it. So then what is the point? Even Dave Jones’ videos have more use because he’s right there with an oscilloscope and voltmeter to show you what’s going on. Tricks tips for “young players” etc.
Edit: I found a sample chapter of TAoE. It is much better than I remember it to be. There is a lot of useful information in here. Maybe newer edition: https://artofelectronics.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/AoE3...
- The Art of Electronics, by Horowitz and Hill, is aimed at a university or professional audience, but could also be an incredible learning resource for a younger student (or older hobbyist!) interested in learning more about the field.
Speaking for myself, I would have loved to read something like this when I was first experimenting with electronics as a child. A lot of the details would have gone over my head, but even just knowing the general outlines of the topics it covered would have been a huge step up.
- What is exciting enough for you that you'll be able to sustain your interest? There's a lot of learning.
I'm going to maybe diverge from some advice and say try and start with hardware connected to your laptop. That's how I started way back (during the original IBM-PC era and a Data Acquisition Card from IBM). Learn how sensors, motors and actuators work. If you were near me I'd lend you a kit I have sitting around that I got for my kids but I'm sure there are options to hook up some basic I/O (Analog and digital) to your laptop.
I would decouple the embedded aspect from this for now and really many embedded systems are running "real" large computer systems. You can build a lot on your desk and having a "real" computer will take away some of the additional hassle of dealing with various embedded platforms. Once you gain a better understanding of the components you can always move to some embedded setup.
The Art of Electronics is one book I will recommend. I would say though start with a kit and use AI or Google search to get some basic circuits going.
- Honestly, just pick up the Art of Electronics - Horowitz and Hill. Spend some time working through that book. By the end of it, you'll have a better grasp of electronics than 90% of the engineers I've worked with, all who are EE bachelors/majors. It's a 3 month job at most, less if you do a dedicated hour a night. Then pick up some breadboard and parts, and build to your hearts content.
Making a working circuit is honestly very easy once you know the basics. Look inside a Made in China knockoff appliance, and you'll see that most things can be made from a couple of conponents and a microcontroller. Pull apart an old TV remote or bluetooth device, and look up the part numbers and what they do. There's not much to it. You have to remember that most of the stuff getting designed and built in South East Asia is done by people with zero qualifications. Electronics being "the thing that smart university people do" in the West is mostly a mental block, culturally constructed because people don't want their kids getting electrocuted so bombard them with constant threat of death if playing with electricity (which mostly isn't a worry anymore unless you're working with mains power).
The true discipline of Electronic Engineering is designing something that works for every eventuality and environment, with close to 100% reliability, at the very cutting edge of what is possible with the components we can afford while balancing physical and financial constraints. That's something which takes years of both academic study and industrial experience.
- "Art of Electronics - Horowitz and Hill."
very good recommendation, that book help me turn my studies in to reality
electronic circuit emulators will help with the basics as well (eg https://www.falstad.com/circuit/)
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