Practical Electronics for Inventors
THE BOOK THAT MAKES ELECTRONICS MAKE SENSE This intuitive, applications-driven guide to electronics for hobbyists, engineers, and students doesn’t overload readers with technical detail. Instead, it tells you-and shows you-what basic and advanced electronics parts and components do, and how they work. Chock-full of illustrations, Practical Electronics for Inventors offers over 750 hand-drawn images that provide clear, detailed instructions that can help turn theoretical ideas into real-life i
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Review by for Practical Electronics for Inventors
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The preface indicates that the book is primarily for electronic neophytes who, apparently, fill the ranks of inventors & hobbyists (?). I would think that the persons who would get the most out of this work would be those with some formal traning in electronic circuit design, perhaps those about to graduate or just grtting established in discrete, commercial circuit design. Also good for the older crowd to stay current.What I see is a voluminous & varied amount of material focusing primarily on discrete circuit design & the IC’s/components available for such work. There is very little math – calculus is avoided where possible. There is a lot of practical info on general circuit development. There is a good overview on digital, op amps, filters, PSs, stepper moters & microcontrollers among others. Some nuggets for the EE too. Remember how you rejoiced when they introduced Phasors during sinusoidal steady-state analysis? But after converting everything into complex numbers & solving the problem, why did you through away the imaginary part? See an elegant little explanation in Chap. 2.Earlier reviewers have spent some time on the errors. Suffice it to say that there are many preventable, inexcusable errors. Many are typos & schematic errors, but others leave you wondering. How could an author with such an obvious command of this subject matter confuse electrical power & electrical energy or enhancement-type & depletion-type FESs? Fun for the EE’s – How many errors can YOU find?Other impressions: 1) If you’re responsible for designing a special circuit – maybe a filter or switching PS & need some pactical info on the subject, would you not search out a book devoted to that single subject? 2) The Water Analogies – spare me, please; Rube Goldberg would turn over in his grave. 3) What about citing a few references every once in awhile? 5) How many of these schematics (for the novice) were modeled or breadboarded?And finally to McGraw-Hill: Don’t you people have any technical proof readers on staff? I think YOU owe us all a recall on this book to be replaced free with an error corrected revision.The revision will be worth 4+ stars; as is 2- stars. There are similar books w/o the errors.
Review by Eric Johanson for Practical Electronics for Inventors
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This book’s intended audience is the serious engineer (probably with an engineering degree in a field other than electronics) looking to get into electronics. The book’s title hints at this, and the book delivers on this level. This book is too advanced for the neophyte dabbler without any math background, who will quickly get lost in the math and the lack of “cookbook” examples. Make no mistake, there are plenty of example circuits, but they’re provided to illustrate concepts– they’re not intended to be a recipe for constructing a real circuit (that’s for the engineer to do!)
MATH: To appreciate this book, you must have a decent math background. This includes a solid working knowledge of advanced algebra and trigonometry, along with a 10000 foot view of calculus. A full working knowledge of actually solving differential equations is NOT required, but it’s extremely helpful to know what derivatives and integrals look like and what they generally mean. However, the author never requires that you actually know how to solve any differential equations. Also, this book uses complex number theory, but the author provides all the details of complex number theory in the book, so there is no need to know it before reading.
After all those caveats, this is an excellent comprehensive introductory book on virtually all fundamental phenomenon and components of electronics. This includes the physics of the various electrical phenomenon, the real-life components that make up electronic circuits, and the basic “building-block” circuits that real-life circuits are built from. See the table of contents in Amazon’s “look-inside” feature for an idea of the scope of topics. If you read and understand this book cover to cover, you will be designing, building, and testing your own basic circuits, without the need to ever rely on a “cookbook” circuit again.
This book does NOT cover the following:
* Advanced building-block circuits
* Specialty components and circuits
* Techniques and guidelines for designing difficult and advanced circuits
* The many “tricks” for designing and debugging circuits that years of experience will teach
* Advanced math for detailed analysis of circuits
The author’s style is, above all else, pragmatic in every respect all the way to the very end. The explanations have the unmistakable and incessant theme of “THIS IS HOW IT WORKS AND WHY”. The author trudges through as much (or as little) detail as necessary to enable the bright mind to understand, and then moves on to the next topic. Even when there is pure theory out of necessity, the author’s style never strays far from cornerstone of always keeping things down to earth and practical.
This book is full of extensive explanations of the “WHY” of various phenomenon and components. For example, the phenomenon of “inductance” goes on for a dozen pages or so, explaining how the motion of electrons creates a magnetic field in a charging inductor, and how the magnetic fields create a back-voltage which acts against the flow of current. This explanation of inductance is decorated with dozens of detailed 3D illustrations showing the wire, electrons, magnetic fields, currents, voltages, etc. Other phenomenon are described in similar detail. The physics and theory that the author presents do not overwhelm you, but are sufficient to leave you feeling like you really understand the phenomenon, rather than just having to accept something as magic.
I gave this book 4 stars instead of 5 because there are too many errata, especially in the theory section. The book is in need of a simple editing pass by a person who understands EE. This is a shame because most of the errata are silly typos or accidental oversights, but they can confuse your ability to understand something when you’re learning for the first time.
Review by for Practical Electronics for Inventors
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This book rocks! I’m an engineering student, and I’ve been looking for a book like this for some time. It’s really covers topics in a manner that I can understand, and seems to touch upon everything in electronics, from theory, semiconductors, integrated circuits, stepper motors and servos, microcontrollers, LCD displays, etc. The drawing are pretty damn cool too. I highly recommend this book to anyone–beginner or engineer.
Review by Kevin Morris for Practical Electronics for Inventors
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Like the other reviewers I found this book a great resource. It has great practical information and diagrams and whacks straight into what you can do with the components and what they are supposed to do without boring you to death with electron theory.Now, I must say although I have a degree in electronics I am quite rusty on fine points and one thing I never did well and subsequently never used, were FETS. I have found unforgivable errors in diagrams and examples in the transistor chapter…mostly related to MOSFETS. When you deal with P and N channels and layers…YOU MUST NEVER make mistakes in a textbook…practical or not. I had to reread sections 10 times to realize that gate voltage polarities were reversed…and the worst..an n-channel depletion layer MOSFET turning on a relay when positive biased at its gate by an AND gate. Hello? An ENHANCEMENT n-channel sure..but like..what the heck???Especially when new learners will be tackling this stuff, some find it hard enough to cram into their brains without it being explained wrong. This book needs fixed!! It is also not really designed for new learners…although I can say new people can gain a lot from it, but you really have to have some background or I could see getting lost fast on the loose use of formulae and Ohm’s law (fundamental but we all had to at least learn and practice it first) SO…good book again could be THE greatest practical instruction book ever if it was cleaned up. I back up the previous reviewer who said that. ONE STAR for the glaring lack of responsibility. It really is a 4 and 1/2 star book but hopefully the bad reviews will kick start the author and McGraw into releasing the second edition.
Review by Dale Pillsbury for Practical Electronics for Inventors
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Having limited financial resources, I checked this book out from my local university library before buying it and have been working my way through it to see if it is worth purchasing. I do expect to purchase this book despite its major flaw, i.e., poor proofreading and/or insufficient editing. Scherz employs a novel and useful approach, dealing first with basic DC and AC R, C and L circuits using math up to and including some calculus and differential equations. His discussion is reasonably thorough without being too detailed. Scherz stresses that, for those who do not wish to (or can not) follow the math in detail, he has the results summarized. His treatment of Thevenin Theorem applications is the best I’ve seen and his introduction of imaginary number equations for AC circuit analysis is an excellent primer. After the basics, Scherz switches to what he calls an intuitive approach to discussing electronic components and their application in circuits. This makes a lot of sense.I did not find his use of water or rope analogies to electronic devices or circuits useful, but that is my personal preference. The big problem with Scherz’s book is poor proofreading and/or editing. One has to be on constant watch for errors. These range in degree:
From simple mislabeling
Missing a dT term in working out the relation of W to C and V
on page 22, referencing fig 2.37 in the third paragraph of
page 34 when Fig 2.37 is meant, giving 5/13 + j1/15 on page 33
when 5/13 + j1/13 is correct, mislabeling the right hand side
of fig 2.4, etc etc )
To simple math or verbiage errors
Substracting rather than adding 0.375 x 5000 for Case I on
p 18, calling the third number on capacitors “3rd digit” rather
than “multiplier” on p 106 or leaving out the word “not” in
Rule 2 for npn case on page 142,
To incorrect statements
Saying (P 53) that notch filters reject all frequencies except
those near the resonant frequency, when in fact notch filters
pass all frequencies except those near the resonant frequency. This is simple sloppiness and detracts from the straightforward reading of an otherwise useful book. I hope a second edition will appear with these unfortunate errors (and lots I’ve probably missed) corrected.