All New Electronics Self-Teaching Guide (Wiley Self Teaching Guides)
- ISBN13: 9780470289617
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
For almost 30 years, this book has been a classic text for electronics enthusiasts. Now completely updated for today?s technology with easy explanations and presented in a more user-friendly format, this third edition helps you learn the essentials you need to work with electronic circuits. All you need is a general understanding of electronics concepts such as Ohm?s law and current flow, and an acquaintance with first-year algebra. The question-and-answer format, illustrative experiments, and s
Rating: 
(out of 23 reviews)
List Price: $ 34.99
Price: $ 19.53
Sharp Electronics PW-E550 Electronic Dictionary
- Full Contents from Best Selling Books
- Calculator and Spell Checker
- Metric/ Currency Converter
- Enchanced Search Function- Quick View
- Enchanced Search Function -Super Jump
Sharp Electronic Dictionary featuring full content from the best selling reference books: The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford American Thesaurus and Garner’s Modern American Usage. Enchanced Search Functions that with filtered search, Sumper Jump and quick view. This unit offers a better viewing display with 2 sixe fonts and includes additonal features like spell check, crossword solver, anagram solver, calculator and also has a metric/currency converter.
Rating: (out of 173 reviews)
List Price: $ 119.99
Price: $ 70.39
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Review by K for Sharp Electronics PW-E550 Electronic Dictionary
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I’ve only had this dictionary/thesaurus for one day, and its all-around perfectness has driven me to write this review. Sharp really does include the full contents of each book in this device!
1) Dictionary: All definitions are explained clearly, many with example sentences and word origins. Want to know about a town, i.e. Altus(purely random)? Type it in – it’s a town in SW Oklahoma, pop. 21910. Phrases? See if you can find this one in your ordinary electronic dictionary – “upset the applecart” or “the whole ball of wax.” Need to refresh your mind on history? This has it all. It unscrambles words, too.
2) Thesaurus: The Complete Oxford American Thesaurus…tons of words.
3) Grammar book: good for refreshing your memory on key points.
On top of that, the font is big, black, and easy to read. The wait times are nonexistent. And yes, you can use “Super Jump” and jump between entries at the touch of a button.
This is the absolute best electronic dictionary I have ever used or seen. If you want an intuitive, easy to use, easy to read, easy to understand electronic dictionary/thesaurus/history/geography/grammar/etc. device, then get this. It’s well worth the money, and you’ll never need another one. Ever.
Review by Allan Holtz for Sharp Electronics PW-E550 Electronic Dictionary
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I bought this unit about a year and a half ago, and soon couldn’t understand how I ever lived without it. The dictionary is quite complete — I haven’t had to go to my OED but maybe once or twice since getting it. The definitions tend to be on the terse side, but not ridiculously so.
The thesaurus is just okay, but I’ve been spoiled by my vintage 1957 Roget’s, which is SO much better than what they slap that name on these days.
So why the negative review? After a year and a half of being my trusty writing desk sidekick it just quit. Wouldn’t turn on, wouldn’t do anything. New battery and jabbing the reset doohickey do nothing. Naturally the warranty is only for a year. If this was a $15 item I’d grumble and get another one, but at $80 I shudder to think what my cost per lookup came out to!
Now I can’t live without one of these little gadgets, but I’ll be trying a different brand. Hope I can find one that’s as good as this and actually lasts awhile!
Review by A Reader for Sharp Electronics PW-E550 Electronic Dictionary
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The Sharp PW-E550 is an excellent product. It is just slightly larger than a deck of cards when closed. It has two font sizes. The smaller one is perfectly readable for me and offers sufficient content on the screen. It performs amazingly well, very quick, and has so far had all the words I needed to look up.
As one person mentioned, spend a few minutes going through the manual as there are a couple of features that are not readily apparent but are very useful. The Super Jump feature being the most notable, which allows you to lookup the definition of a word within a definition.
The Sharp PW-E550 does everything I wanted it to do and more. A great buy.
Review by J. Wang for Sharp Electronics PW-E550 Electronic Dictionary
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I’m a big electronic dictionary geek – I own four of them. Two of them for languages (Japanese and Chinese) and two for English. I’m a writer and I am constantly reading and looking up words, and I like to be able to do away from my computer because honestly, who wants to lug around a laptop when they just want to take a book out to a coffeeshop?
I own both the Merriam-Webster 11th Collegiate Speaking Dictionary (with a Concise Columbia Encyclopedia card) and the Sharp PW-E550. I owned the Merriam-Webster first, then bought this one, and actually bought the Seiko Concise Encyclopedia Britannica for a while before I returned that one. Here’s a comparison between the two, and a little mention of the last one:
- Both have a similar range of definitions. There are some words I could find in the MW I couldn’t in the Sharp (McGuffin), and there are some I could find in the Sharp but not the MW (phylogenic, the Bowery). I find that the MW tends to have slightly more in-depth definitions and the Sharp one reads a bit more concise and colloquial. The Sharp does provide examples of usage while the MW doesn’t.
- The MW doesn’t have a visual pronounciation key, while the Sharp does. That’s because the MW speaks out the words. This to me was kind of silly because you don’t always want to hear the words out loud (like, in a library, or just about anywhere public), even if they included a headphone jack. What became problematic was that the speaking gizmo on my MW broke after a few months, and now I can’t even hear the pronounciation even if I want to.
- The Sharp will list all the words possible with each input of a letter (i.e., if you punch in “a” it’ll list all the words that begin with “a,” then if you punch in “b” it’ll list all the words that begin with “ab” until you get to the word you want. The MW waits until you input all the letters and hit “enter,” then it searches until it finds something. It takes about a second or two for it to find something that is in its dictionary, but if you punched in something with the wrong spelling or it just doesn’t know, it’ll take a while, maybe five seconds, which gets kind of exasperating, especially once you get used to the Sharp.
- The Sharp, when you turn it on, displays exactly what you had when you last had it on. The MW always starts with the same default screen. The Sharp also has a memory feature, that goes back some forty or so of your last entries.
- The buttons on the MW are hard and they hurt after prolonged usage. The buttons on the Sharp are pretty soft, which ends up with the opposite problem, you may not push hard enough on them at times.
- The Concise Encyclopedia that came with the MW is extremely painful to use. It’s slower than the dictionary and when you do page up or page down it often goes straight to the previous or next entry. Otherwise it provides some decent amount of information at your fingertips. I’m just afraid of the tediousness of it all.
- The leather flip cover for the MW is really flimsy, while the Sharp is neatly self-protecting. I also like how you can open the whole thing 180 degrees, which is something the Seiko can’t do. The Seiko only opens up to about 135 degrees, which might seem adequate until you get used to the Sharp.
- The games that come with the MW aren’t so great. I like the idea of creating your own wordlist, but it barely takes any, maybe 20 maximum. After playing with them a bit my first week with the MW, I stopped using the game function.
- The Sharp has a grammar guide that I hardly ever use. I suppose it could be handy, but it just feels impractical.
For a long while I carried around both the MW and the Sharp, with Sharp being my first resource then, if I have to, the MW, and if I really have to, the Concise Encyclopedia in the MW. After a while I just ditched the MW and now I only use the Sharp. It is a far better experience, and it’s become an indispensible tool. The Seiko I was really excited to check out, but for the price I was quite disappointed. The user experience, while better than the MW, pales compared to the Sharp. The entries in the Seiko are great, a lot of information and depth, but most of the terms in there are in the Sharp anyway, just not with as much detail. For $180, I decided I could just stick with the Sharp for basic concepts on the proper nouns, and head to my laptop when I want more in-depth detail.
Overall, I recommend anyone with a remote interest in having an English electronic dictionary to go with the Sharp. It’s the best portable reference I’ve found so far.
Review by Phyrephox for Sharp Electronics PW-E550 Electronic Dictionary
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I had been thinking about buying an electronic dictionary since they first appeared on the market. I knew pretty much what I wanted in a device but until now, I’ve found them all wanting in some area that was important to me. This device is absolutely perfect for my needs. These are the attributes that I was looking for, in roughly most important to least important order:
It had to be easy and intuitive to use
It had to have a very comprehensive dictionary and thesaurus
It had to show (not speak) pronunciation
It had to be non-invasive (imagine using one of the speaking dictionaries in a classroom or library setting)
It had to be reasonably priced
The PW-E550 meets all of these requirements.
At the time I was considering the PW-E550 I was reading two books: “Being And Nothingness” by Sarte and “How To Be Alone” by Jonathan Franzen (as an aside, if you’re not familiar with Jonathan Franzen I highly recommend checking him out). I decided to page through each book and write down a short list of words that I either did not know the meaning of, or was unclear of. I then took that list of words to my local bookstore, found the hardcopy version of “The New Oxford American Dictionary” and looked up my words. With the minor exception of “transphenomenal”, I found all of my words in some form (with “transphenomenal” I was able to find “phenomenal”, “phenomena” and “trans-”).
To give you an idea of what I was looking for I unashamedly present my word list:
nihilates, transphenomenal, ontological, heterogeneity, facticity, thematized, interiorization, objectivation, vagaries, preponderant, exigencies, isolationism, milieu, preemption, multilateralism
When I received the PW-E550 the first thing I did was to recheck my word list. My experience was better than I expected. Not only did I find the same words and definitions, I didn’t have to glance at the manual at all to figure out what to do. I just pressed the “DICT” button, typed my word and watched the list of words that matched my typing get smaller until my word (or a form of it) was displayed.
The screen has two zoom settings and the contrast makes the display easy to read. The entire unit could fit comfortably into a shirt pocket (both size and weight). The fact that it uses a single AAA battery (as a previous reviewer mentioned) is a real plus.
There was one feature that I did not think about until I started using the device – it would be nice if, when looking at a definition, I could look up any of the words in the definition without losing my place. That’s when I picked up the manual and much to my delight I discovered the device can do this (they call it “Super Jump”). It’s not as intuitive as the other features but once you’ve used it, it becomes obvious. Finally, the hardcopy version of the dictionary has pictures on some pages but the E550 does not. Again, not an issue for me.
I would like to comment on an earlier review where the author gave this unit a one star review. She complained that the PW-E550 is a dumbed-down version of the PW-E500. By dumbed-down, she meant it had fewer words than the E550. This is true. However, the PW-E500 uses the “Oxford English Dictionary” and its corresponding “New Oxford Thesaurus”. That dictionary gives both English (as in England) and American definitions, likewise the thesaurus. This would be a personal choice. I don’t need to see both “color” and “colour” in my dictionary but that’s just me. To me it was like she was saying that she thinks a Jaguar is a better car than a Cadillac therefore a Cadillac is a lousy car. This is a great reference tool.
If you have any doubts about the contents of this unit, go look at the hardcopy versions. I am very impressed and absolutely delighted that I have such a simple yet comprehensive reference sitting on the arm of my chair as I read.
Review by M. Mauger for All New Electronics Self-Teaching Guide (Wiley Self Teaching Guides)
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I’ve read a few reviews on here complaining that this text is not for the beginner, and that’s true if you just want to kind-of know what it is someone else is talking about. But if you’re willing to try and teach yourself electronics, as implied by even being interested in this text, then this IS the book for you.
Look, to get a book that covers the basics is a waste of time and money and here’s why: The basics that this book expects you to know can be learned over the course of a couple of days. We’re talking about a couple of very casual hours at MOST.
I am a complete beginner and I bought this book last weekend because my beginners book of choice (Electronics for dummies by the same author) was not available and I wanted to get started right away. Ohms law? No idea. But with a couple of online resources [...]and this book’s first chapter (a full review of topics expected as knowledge base complete with review problems and a test), you’re through the basics. BAM! that’s it.
Get a beginners book and you’ll be missing out on all sorts of material. BUY THIS INSTEAD. Do the work, you’ll be proud of yourself, you’ll go further, you’ll be more skilled etc…
By the way I just finished the chapter 2 test on Diodes and though challenged, I am not stumped. This book challenges and engages, just as all of the reviews said it would. It does have it’s flaws as in there’s a couple of times it has skipped explaining an equation, but nothing that keeps you from moving forward and improving your knowledge-base.
If you’re willing to do the work the title of this book implies, then GET IT. I can’t recommend it enough.
Review by A novice for All New Electronics Self-Teaching Guide (Wiley Self Teaching Guides)
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I’ve got a very basic understanding of electrical stuff, but not enough to make myself happy. I wanted to to know more, but I don’t have time to go take a class. I figured a self-teaching book might be the answer for me, if I could find one that I’d be able to understand. So, I called a friend who has some background in the subject, and she suggested this book.
It’s got great step by step problems you can work, along with self-tests to help you determine how you’re doing. The explanation of concepts and the book’s layout make it easy to understand.
I think this book is for people with a basic knowledge of electronics and algebra who want to expand their horizons, but, if you’ve got that, this book easily walks you through understanding the equations needed for understanding circuit design. I found it easier to understand than most other books I considered.
Review by Ann C. Treacy for All New Electronics Self-Teaching Guide (Wiley Self Teaching Guides)
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My husband wrote the following evaluation of this book. “As a former scientist (who now reviews theatre), I liked the authors’ Socratic-like question-and-answer format for teaching this otherwise terrifying topic. It asks the thousand and one questions that need to be asked, in the right order, gives you a moment or two to come up with something, then instantly shares the right answer for quick comparison with your own impulsive thought waves. If you start at page one, relax, take your good old time with each and every question, you will emerge 12 chapters later with an amazing and practical grasp of electronics.”
Review by MacFeegle for All New Electronics Self-Teaching Guide (Wiley Self Teaching Guides)
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I owned this book about ten years ago when I was studying electronics in college. It was an absolutely essential resource then, so when an “All New” version came out I wanted to take a look. Would this just be a new cover on old material? I was delighted to find that that was not the case. Not only have the pages of the book have been redesigned, making it easier to find what you need, but the explanations of concepts have been made much clearer, and the writing style and examples have been much improved. If you are new to electronics this is a great way to learn. If you’re seasoned, this is a reference you should have on your shelf. What else can I say–go out and buy it!
Review by Louise Curry for All New Electronics Self-Teaching Guide (Wiley Self Teaching Guides)
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I am a little slow when it comes to electronics so I was surprised to find how easy it is to understand and grasp the principles that are discussed in this clear and concise self-teaching guide. It is a step-by-step guide that puts forth a reasonable amount of material, then sort of steps back and asks you questions about what you’ve just read. In this way, the book engages the reader more thoroughly than a lot of other books I’ve seen on this subject. (My husband is a computer programmer and owns quite a few books on elelctronics, circuit design, etc.) While the book is excellent at precise explanations – good for beginners – my husband and a few of his computer buddies found the book interesting as well. Overall, a great guide for the neophyte electronics person as well as for the more experienced…