Is this a good book for beginners? What other books are good for electronics beginners? Preferably cheaper than this... :)
Is this a good book for beginners? What other books are good for electronics beginners? Preferably cheaper than this... :)
This book was pivotal for me.
In grad school, my advisor recommended this book, saying, "it will be right up your alley." I bought the second edition, and it was. It is truly a graduate level course in circuit design. I started reading this book (2nd edition) front-to-back, and when I finished it, I started again. It helped me innumerable times when I quit grad school and entered industry.
When the third edition came out, I was at Google in Cambridge, and Horowitz came to talk. I had bought a counterfeit copy from Amazon (by accident), and while he didn't sign it then, he did sign it later (when I got a real copy).
Personally, I think it's worth owning both the second and third editions of this book. It is truly one of the best books about electrical engineering out there.
2nd edition is the best one. Mine is falling apart at the spine but I love it
Why (better than the most recent 3rd)?
Yes, the 2nd edition (silver cover) is the best. The 'meat' in the 2nd edition, at least it seemed to me more practical stuff. The 'bad circuits' alone is awesome.
OTOH, the "X Chapters" of the 3rd edition is one of those analog-guru secret handshake books where The Masters take the Apprentice deep into the bowels of kick-butt analog engineering. Where simplification are eschewed for the Real Answers. https://x.artofelectronics.net/
thanks for the tips! i had assumed the 3rd edition was better at least in the eyes of the authors
The 3rd edition is better. It's not even close. I have no idea where these posters are coming from.
I’m curious about the counterfeit thing. Did he identify that fact somehow and decline to sign it? Was there some sort of authenticity check built into the books?
As the author claims on his website, if the price is affordable then it is counterfeit. I hope the author understands that such affordable "editions" make the book accessible and popular outside the First World.
Amazon sells a bunch of counterfeit books. They're usually trivial to recognize by the shitty paper and printing. May not be obvious to many buyers, but the author of the book would typically be extremely familiar with what the official prints look and feel like.
The Horowitz talk at Google is excellent. He's been working on radio hardware and SETI for a long time... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sImBlq542TQ
Dense, wordy, incomprehensible. Phys123 alum here.
Yeah, I have no idea what's going on in the comment section. The book is incredibly inaccessible and at least 9 out of 10 students aren't able to read through it
I feel it's only praised bc it's comprehensive and historically important
It's a horrible way to learn electronics
This book is an excellent discussion of electronics once you have a working knowledge of basic circuits. The fact that they touch on so much in the book makes it useful as a "Wikipedia" starting point.
I agree that you should not learn from this book from zero. The first few chapters attempt to be an intro but it's not intended to be a gentle introduction.
This year I started picking up on fixing analog electronics as an extension of my stage hand/ audio engineering/ etc work. It's fun and feels nice when I can actually fix something, plus it's a cash business.
For instance, on my own I was able to identify a bad opamp on the in input section of a mixer and rework it (after replacing a bunch of electrolytics and a couple smd transistors, cause I am a novice at this kind of work). Still, I'm not totally a stranger to electronics.
I started in on that book- I kind of agree with the preceding comments.
I plan to come back to it, but I have been watching a lot of youtube, and that has felt a lot more helpful in a lot of ways. I mostly am interested in learning to reason about what is happening in analog circuits so I can eventually clone some instruments and signal processing- maybe I am not the audience for the book.
Like Aaron Lanterman's lectures at Georgia Tech are feeling a whole lot more useful to my interests (granted, I am mostly trying to understand analog electronics because that is what folks bring me that need to be fixed).
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOunECWxELQSbOv3ekzuw...
Similarly, following Moritz Klein's discussions has been quite helpful... the whole "here is what we're going to build" and then following through with things has felt very siilar to Ben Eater's series on microprocessors.
Still, the chummy ivy-leage tone of TAE wasn't super duper fun for me. I will probably keep returning to it until I can get through it quickly, but for my purposes (and I suspect a lot of folks who aren't on an academic path) it's not maybe the quickest, strongest path to a lot of ends.
a more useful book for audio electronics is Handbook for Sound Engineers by Ballou. there are detailed discussions of common preamp circuits, equalizers, and that sort of thing.
I find the style a bit rambly and even though it's long it doesn't spend too much time on most topics. It really shines when you're a practicing engineer 5+ years out of school and want something to explain how to whip up the circuit that you know you've learned exists in the past.
It especially shines if you need the first principles of precision amplification.
it's neither comprehensive nor, as far as i know, historically important, but i've sure learned a lot about electronics from it
i certainly haven't read through it like a novel, though! it's more like, read a few pages, draw a few schematics, run a few simulations, write a few pages of notes, repeat. sometimes the pages are pages i've read previously. plausibly i'll never finish the book, and that's fine with me
i find it both more accessible and more reliable than commonly suggested alternatives like sedra & smith; what alternative would you recommend?
How can it be dense and wordy at the same time? One is the opposite of the other.
Terse and wordy would be opposites. Dense means thick with verbiage like a forest thick with foliage.
Meta: I hope in the near future every book will come with its own tuned LLM that can answer questions specific about a particular section/problem of the book. Answer of the model should account for prior asked questions, and preferred learning method - just like having access an instructor or TA when enrolled in a course.
This is already doable with a PDF, RAG, and (optionally) a local LLM. Might just give that a go, actually.
Please do it!
Please explain how to do it!
ChatGPT was honestly already this for a sufficiently popular book/topic but they've managed to lobotomize it as of recently so it takes a lot more coaxing to actually get to the point.
I was thinking multi-modal, and feedbacks that are very specific. For example, building circuits from components and having the model tell you what you did wrong and suggest improvements.
it's called the author /jk
Like an online forum?
This was my bible as a teenager.
I just pulled it down from the shelf to comment, and literally a bunch of wires and solder blobs fell out on my desk.
Imho what sets it apart is chapter 10 (Minicomputers) which gives you enough to understand and build a simple microprocessor board, and chapter 12 (Construction Techniques) that sets you up to build things properly. Without this I wouldn't have progressed to Alan Clements' "Microprocessor Systems Design" and got my first 68000 design working.
What a wonderful gift to the world. thanks mssrs. Horowitz and Hill.
I took a class where we used Learning the Art of Electronics (with AoE as a reference), and that book was also excellent. Class was taught by a former student of Horowitz and Hill, and one week the OG did the guest lecture! Unforgettable.
I went through every book store in Cambridge this past Fall and couldn't find it. I ended up having to order it from Cambridge University Press (located in the other Cambridge). When I looked through Harvard's course catalog for upcoming semesters it didn't look like AoE was part of the curriculum of Harvard's PHYS 123 anymore. It seems like such a shame. If I'm wrong someone please correct me.
The digital half of class is available via extension (which is how I did it) although it moves at half speed. And for some reason the analog portion hasn’t been offered for a couple of years.
I had the cool experience of taking that class from Prof. Horowitz himself. Not only was the class great, but there were lots of stories around the department of him solving electronics problems for other professors’ experiments (my favorite was probably one where a team flew him out to CERN in Switzerland, expecting the problem to take a few days to solve. On the way in from the airport, Horowitz asked them to stop at the lab and show him what was going on. They said there was plenty of time and they would get started the next morning. Horowitz insisted, and they finally relented. They stopped at the lab and showed him the experimental setup and described what wasn’t working. He grabbed a wire, soldered it in, problem was fixed, and he enjoyed a couple of days of vacation in Switzerland.)
For me, it's probably the best physics book ever written. Something you can actually read from cover to cover.
Indeed, I just checked it online and it is definitely a very informative book.
A gem of a book. Also check out "Bad Circuits": https://artofelectronics.net/bad-circuits/
Nice find. What would happen to the 1st circuit, isn't it still a parallel circuit?
Assuming you mean the one labeled "voltage divider", the problem is that it doesn't actually divide voltage because the input and output are switched. The unloaded output voltage is the same as the input voltage.
Thanks for your helpful comment! I was also struggling with the bad circuits voltage divider.
I liked the book but I would like a lot more detail on why the bad circuits are bad. Some are obvious but I thought a few were quite difficult to understand the issue.
I can appreciate the point of view that self discovery of the answer is an important path to learning, but you never know if you are learning the correct lesson. I fortunately had a understanding chief engineer who helped guide me in my early career before I moved to software.
Title should include 2015.
Great work but be sure to check the extensive errata: https://artofelectronics.net/errata/
Damn, thanks for pointing that out. That's way more than an acceptable number of errors for a book like this, imo.
105 errata (pretty small ones) in a 1000-page book. For highly technical work, I'd say that's not too bad. Looking at the errata for Vol I of TAOCP, there's a lot more for a much shorter work (600 pages).
books that have less errors per page generally do not contain factual information
of course many factual books have less reported errors per page, but that's not at all the same thing
Is there a German version of this?
The German is on page 9.
"This page intentionally left blank" ?
Great reference!
I tried to read it through straight, but got pretty lost somewhere in the transistor section.
The bad news: I still suck at electronics.
The good news: I have this book on hand as a reference.
For better, or for worse: You can get quite far these days being an IC baby. Connect pin A to pin B by apeing data sheet reference diagrams. Electronics-by-numbers, perhaps. So, for better or for worse, electronics fundamentals is only a hard-requirement if you're the one designing the ICs. (Even with RF, there are modules, and IC filters) You can likely think of several programming analogies.
So this is overkill if I’m only hacking around with sensors and iot devices?
Probably. I think it's always nice to have an understanding of what's going on behind the scenes; this book more describes the circuits that make up the sensor and iot devices, for example.
You can make practical devices by learning an EDA tool like KiCad, get familiar with how to choose parts, and get a feel for how to quickly/effectively extract the info you need from datasheets for various part classes.
If you are looking to design those parts, you need the skills in this book.
The sacred Jedi texts!
This was the one non-religious thing I was allowed to read during my fundie upbringing period. It kept me arguably sane (I'm an EE now). Biking to the one reachable Radio Shack to get parts and taking apart toys. Good times.
Holy crap, this is maybe the scariest thing I’ve read in a week. You must have known the book really, really well. Glad you had an escape!
I've read the second edition together with the student manual (https://learningtheartofelectronics.com/) which has additional explanations for some tricky concepts plus extra exercises.
I can really recommend it as a starting point from no/minimal knowledge to having a good overview of the key concepts.
It doesn't cover (at least the 2nd ed didn't) fancy digital stuff (modern microcontrollers, USB, FPGAs, etc) but there are great free online resources for that.
Years ago, I had the lovely opportunity to take the course associated with the student manual at Harvard Extension, taught by the author, Tom Hayes. I was a little high school brat, so Tom probably does not have fond memories of me, but I loved that course, and it set me on the path to becoming an embedded engineer. If you're in the Boston area, consider taking the course via Harvard Extension!
Yes 100% agree! If I remember, there were two courses, one analog and one digital. Maybe it was one for both but in any case well worth it!
I’ve been thinking about buying a copy of this but it seems like a pretty steep price to do in a whim. Is the third edition that much more necessary/ up-to-date than a good used copy of the second as a relative novice? Will I end up learning decades old things that are not relevant now?
As someone who took EECS and used many old electronics books, you don't need anything newer than probably 1980 to have great electronics knowledge.
If you're interested in Analog (designing transistors in Cadence) and Digital design (making your own CPU in Verilog / VHDL), newer materials make sense because of improvements to processes for analog and FPGA capabilites for digital.
For discrete electronics projects (learning about all the components and their uses) and understanding circuit design etc, anything old is as good as anything new.
for analog IC design, i highly recommend the excellent Designing Analog Chips[1] written by the person who designed the 555 timer. other books are more comprehensive and will give you all the theory, but this book is concise, practical, and free (at least for the pdf version).
Just picked up a copy of this, and have had the hands-on course book on my shelf for a little while now.
Really started to start digging into the former! Any tips for getting through such a massive tome, or is it really something you can just run through front to back?
And for the hands-on lab course book, are the parts lists provided still the best way to get the components, or have there been better ways since its publication? Some of the prices of the tools are pretty daunting.
If you can find a ham radio fest or swap meet near you, it's possible to find a lot of different components and equipment cheap, though sometimes in less than ideal condition. Look for surplus departments at local colleges, labs, companies, etc. too. Find out where e-waste goes, and whether you can salvage from it before it gets hauled away. Lots of stuff likely gets thrown out that either still works, can be fixed, or can be used for parts. Downside is you have to plan projects around what you found instead of just buying parts after picking a project.
Non-EE here, but I went through a bit of the lab course as a hobbyist.
Unfortunately a lot of the parts on the lab course's list are end of life now, and it's not always clear what you can substitute them with. There aren't always replacement parts with the exact same specs on digikey. I did source a couple parts through eBay.
Additionally, there are parts that aren't in the BOM that are used in the lab course. An early one has you doing a test against a black box with something inside it, and the book only tells you later what was supposed to be inside it. I think there's a basic control theory chapter at some point, and there are parts in that chapter that weren't in the BOM.
Ultimately, I got frustrated with the book continuing to ask me to use stuff I didn't know I was supposed to have, and gave up. It got annoying having to get partially through a chapter, order something, wait for it to arrive, then continue. Maybe I would have stuck with it if I'd checked up-front what I was expected to have for all the chapters, and got EVERYTHING in advance. (but again I think it's going to get harder and harder to actually buy what's in the BOM as time goes on)
It has been a long time since I last opened this book, which was a library. I recall being surprised by the glowing reviews since I was dumbfounded by the contents. It all felt very loosey goosey for me, like looking in grandma's cookbook. Did I miss something? Should I revisit?
I found that I clicked much better with MIT's Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits.
that is why the word art is in the title. regardless, it gives you a good feel for how many engineers actually design stuff in the industry. the problem spaces aren't fully constrained, so you have to fill in the gaps with experience, guesswork, experimentation, and (yes) art.
if you want to cook a good meal you're probably better off with grandma's cookbook than the second edition of pauling's general chemistry
I bought a copy of this in the past few months. I had my trusty AoE 2E but learned that 3E had expanded chapters on what's happened in the past 30 years in precision amplification. Turns out I was working on a schematic for a nanovolt meter (10 kHz BW, 1 kV isolation).
I whipped out every trick in chapters 5 and 7. I transcribed the massive opamp tables into excel to get a lay of the land and was able to find even newer models that exceeded. I settled on OPA4189 for gain, OP224B for isolation, and OPA1633 for output driving / final gain. It's out to fab now.
I initially wanted to use AD since they're the local guys and I like their style more than TI (who came off as a bit culty in their recruiting). Well all of AD's designs still in production for isolation are 5V supply max. What am I supposed to do with that? Analog inputs do best with bipolar 10V. I'm not eating into my noise budget and adding BOM/complexity because a vendor doesn't feel like making the high quality parts that they used to.
vintage nos analog devices parts on ebay when
(2015) I guess. Or maybe (1980)...
don't forget that the 3rd edition has a separate volume titled The Art of Electronics: The X Chapters which includes some really fascinating material i've never seen anywhere else. a lot of practical design tips for working with real components along with some very advanced circuit designs. if you're already an EE, this volume is a great way to sharpen your skillset.
I have a shady, p2p-sourced PDF, but will definitely get the actual hard cover once 4th edition hits.
It is good.
I suggest ARRL Handbook. It covers everything, from atom structure to FPGA programming, through antenna design, modulation/demodulation priciples and digital signal processing. The 2023rd edition counts six volumes.
I'm actually not surprised to see the counterfeit warning in the site.
Last week I've ordered a book from Amazon Italy (A Little Java, A Few Patterns) only to receive what I do consider a very low quality copy of the book and somehow different edition despite having both the original and this "copy" same ISBNs: https://www.amazon.it/Little-Java-Few-Patterns/dp/0262561158 and here's the cover of the original one: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561150/a-little-java-a-few-p... Not only covers are different (the title in the copy is actually shifted to the rightmost part just as seen in Amazon which immediately makes you think about a counterfeit copy) but the quality of the paper, quality of the cover (both front and back cover bend) and print are different. It feels like the book was printed by a copy center.
Taking a more detailed look at the back it turns out that these alternate versions are printed by Amazon in Italy (despite the fun fact that the very first page states that indeed the copy I have was printed and bound in the USA).
So be very careful to purchase books from Amazon, you can get surprises like these. I used to buy from book depository and as it was indeed another business from Amazon I thought that they would still offer quality books behind scenes, but it seems to be room for Amazon to now also get involved in the business of printing low quality books.
While I was confirmed that indeed the copy I received is not a counterfeit I find it very dodgy for Amazon to do this without at least explicitly mention it in the site.
people often ask why things like this get linked on the front page
i suspect that in this case it's because two comments on the nand2tetris thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735066 recommended the book (which i remember because i wrote one of them)
possibly if this thread is of interest to you, that one will be too
Love this book!
Best electronics textbook ever written, without exception.
Highly recommend buying the paper edition.
I just confirmed - this book was my first purchase on Amazon. May 24th, 1999. I had just decided to go from undeclared to EECS at Cal and wanted to take a crash course in hardware. I read the book over the summer and never turned back.
There are books that should be used as references, and books that should be used to teach beginners. They are usually different books.
I had the second edition as a college text book in the early 90s.
"Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man." https://artofelectronics.net/lebowski/
"Practical electronics for inventors" is what you are looking for. I have both books and I am a physicist. It's not that TAOE is not for beginners, it could be if you really want to put on the effort and are decided to go deep.
I just really, really wish there was a student companion book. Maybe I should pay someone to help me with exercise questions. Electronics is hard!
honestly in the post-internet age i would just get on Adafruit, they have so many tutorials and projects that are perfect for a beginner.
as far as a book, i do agree with @nhatcher , i loved Practical Electronics for Inventors but that was before the internet really took over.
Do they have stuff that doesn't rely on microcontrollers? I'm a software engineer since 10 years, I don't want to copy/paste some poorly written C code, I want to solder stuff together :)
No, I don't recommend it if you are starting out. Unfortunately I don't have a good recommendation, but when starting out modern electronics is not unlike lego building. There's more protocols than analog signals.
If you stay in electronics you'll end up with this book sooner or later though.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/wiki/education
I am a huge fan of the Forrest Mims books and "Practical Electronics for Inventors".
AoE is great, but not a beginners book. More important than any book is building and understanding circuits.
It’s good for beginners (also a great reference). However, stuff gets serious pretty fast, and the reader is expected to put in serious time and effort.
Reading some of the other comments, and my own experience, it might be a good book for someone who has already spent some time playing with circuits.
But that's not necessarily an unreasonable hurdle. After all, electronics is about something that happens physically, and maybe getting some tactile experience gets the right brain cells working to be receptive to the theory. Or maybe it's just that the enjoyment of the physical stuff supplies the motivation to learn the textbook stuff.
I might think along similar lines if someone asked for a good textbook to learn how to play the cello.
When I took electronics in college, from 1st edition AoE, I had already been tinkering with circuits for a few years. And playing the cello. ;-)
Bebop to the Boolean Boogie
After Dick Smith's fun way books as an early teenager AoE was my first "real" electronics book. It was certainly helpful for practical advice, but I did not find its presentation of circuit theory at all clear (the hand-wavy analogy about transistor man comes to mind). At the time I had a music degree and very little undergraduate mathematics and only high-school physics.
More recently I've been dabbling with electronics again. Someone recommended Malvino's "Electronic Principles" (I bought the 5th Edition second hand), which I found much clearer for circuit theory than AoE. Sedra and Smith will probably be my next purchase but I doubt it should be your first.
Also, "beginner" could mean a lot of different things. And perhaps more important than where you're at, where do you want to get to? There's a world of difference between (1) soldering together someone else's design, (2) being able to understand why someone else's design works, (3) being able to piece something together from common sub-circuits, (4) produce your own design from scratch. And all of these will vary depending on the circuit type: analog/digital/RF etc.
I've been burning alot of time learning electronics. This book isnt too bad for beginners, but I get way more understanding out of Behrad Razavi's stuff, he has lectures on youtube as well as a book which has way more worked examples. OTOH this book introduces more intricate concepts much more early which can be good for motivation if you dont let yourself get stuck on totally understanding them. For example he goes through a BPT schmitt trigger before he even shows the small signal model for BPTs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQDfVJzEymI