Electronics Demystified

by Stan Gibilisco

Book Overview

SUPERCHARGE your understanding of ELECTRONICS Learn electronics without getting your wires crossed Electronics Demystified, Second Edition teaches you fundamental concepts and applications step by... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0071434933
• ISBN13: 9780071434935
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing
• Length: 401 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.5" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Great overview

There are countless excellent electronics books on the market, many targeted towards the beginner, but I believe that none are more suitable than this book for reading from beginning to end. If you take the intention of this book to heart, which is to skim the breadth of analog electronics, then you will find it to be a fun, fun read. Use it to create mental landmarks for your further exploration of specific topics. By no means should you expect to design a circuit just from having read this book, because that is definitely not what it is meant for. The unfortunate fact is that analog electronics is a vast field, plagued with more apparent mysteries than is the field of digital electronics. For instance, many excellent introductory analog electronics books start with the op-amp and immediately dive into 5 chapters of detailed analysis of different op-amps and their circuits. (E.g. what is the frequency response, how to tweak it for temperature stability, what is the signal-to-noise ratio, etc, etc, etc.) That is what a circuit designer will appreciate, but to an electronics novice, getting a wonderful training in op-amps will not open his/her eyes to how anything fits in the big picture. That is exactly where this book comes into play. It spends a mere few pages on the op-amp, doesn't try to analyze it hardly at all. You learn how you could possibly use it, and you're on to the next topic. At some point in the future, perhaps you might come across a circuit with an op-amp, you'll at least know what it roughly does, and if you choose, you can get another excellent book that focuses on op-amps to do your own design. I think the market really needs a book such as this one, and the author has done a great service.

Useful as a first exposure

If you are new to electronics and have no idea about circuits, transistors, diodes, antennas or even what these words really mean, this might be the right book for you. It introduces all these concepts, and lets you get exposed to them in a systematic way. However, the concepts may be introduced a bit haphazardly, and it's not always easy to see how all the material fits together. The book is also filled with exercises and quizzes, and these may be the most worthwhile aspects of the books. Nonetheless, keep in mind that electronics is an empirical discipline, so the real learning happens with hands-on experience with building (and blowing up) of actual physical circuits. But if you are just interested in getting exposed to the basic concepts, this would be a good book to read.

Direct and easy to understand

This book provides a solid foundation to electronics. I plan to keep it on my shelf for quick and easy reference.

An Excellent Introduction

This book covers all the basics neccessary to get a very basic understanding of electronics and electricity. Providing the neccessary formulas and definitions, this book makes a great study guide, with quizes and tests to help measure your progress. This book is good to have, but not absolutely neccessary because other books might cover the topics here and then delve deeper, but, for someone with no prior knowledge, this book is fairly simple to get through and understand while still teaching you everything you need to know to move ahead.