Customer Reviews

Basic Electronics Theory With Projects and Experiments

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I won't go on forever listing all the issues with this book, as the general idea has already been conveyed by many other reviews, but the sheer number of typographical errors in this book render it completely useless. What good is a technical literature if you never know whether or not the information you are reading is accurate, or whether or not it is a typo? Many of the errors are just sheer stupidity, a complete lack of proofreading, or both. Even some critical equations, such as certain rearrangements of Joule's law, are stated incorrectly. I can not believe this book was allowed to be published. I am seriously considering returning it.

This book at first glance appears to be a concise and informative introduction to the field of basic electronics. Upon closer inspection, however, numerous errors are apparent in the text. A number of stupid errors crept into this book at some point in its writing leading often to confusion as to what is being referred to. Too much time must therefore be spent trying to figure out what the author is talking about and this makes the book much less useful as a result. Sloppy proof reading (or maybe none at all) have allowed errors to slip through such as referring to the wrong question numbers in the self tests, screwed up equations (missing equals signs, subsitution of I2 for 12 twice in the first few chapters etc), numerous typos (fist instead of list appears in the introduction and things such as E3 being substituted for R3), ...I could go on and on. Anyway, this poor quality of the text makes this book sadly much less of interest and use to those who want to learn some basic electronics. The author makes some nice analogies early in the book that help aid the basic understandings and his style seems to be rather good other than the numerous typos and other errors. One thing that did bother me was his apparent love of rounding off numbers at the first opportunity. Granted, electronics is often a field where 5 decimal places are not required but while learning the theory it is important to know that the answer you get disagrees with the answer in the book because you have gotten the theory wrong and not because you failed to round off the numbers at each step to some random number of significant figures. All in all, knowing now what I know I would not have bought the book. If you can spend the time working around the errors, however, this book will provide a decent understanding of most of the fundamental concepts of electronics theory.

Luckily I did not buy this book, I borrowed it. I was very excited when I first brought this book home, but after I actually got into it I started to realize that it is full of typographical errors. At first I thought it was me, I was pulling my hair out thinking that my calculator had broke or I was just "missing something". Even simple multiplication was wrong. For example in an equation the book (page 78) states that "159000 / (3.3 x 0.68)= 159000 / 206.04" How did the author come up with 206.04??? The last time I checked my calculator, 3.3 x 0.68 = 2.244. I have been through six chapters so far and there are MANY typo's. I wonder to myself if what I am learning is actually correct or is it a typo? What about the in-depth chapters? I will continue to read this book for a very basic overview of electronics but that's about it.

I bought this book in hopes of using it as a techincal reference to review fundamental electrical principals and theory. Unfortunatley, I was disappointed that this book had errors in the text and/ or diagrams that could lead to confusion for those who have no background in electonic theory. If the errors were corrected, it would be an OK introduction to electronics for non- techincal person. If you are looking for technical information and theory in any detail, this is not the book to buy.

All the previous reviews that mention the errors in this book are correct. This book is FULL of typos. I put up with them, correcting them along the way until the second group of experiments. Both Exp 9 - common base amplifier and Exp 11 - common collector amplifier do not work. After that point I gave up going any further in the book. If you are trying to learn electronics, hands on experiments are where you are really going to understand what is going on. Well this book will fail you on that point. Absolutely terrible! Do not waste your money.

I have also found errors in this book, especially in the OP-AMP section where he distinguishes an inverting OP-AMP with a noninverting OP-AMP with the same passive elements. The Gain formula, according to the book, only differs by a negative sign for the 2 circuits. This is wrong.

Other then that, it does provide a good foundation for beginners understanding of electronics (conceptually).

As I write, this FOURTH (!) edition book has about a dozen scathing reviews and a half dozen good-to-equivocating reviews. Strangely, I find myself agreeing with all of them. Horn's writing style really IS remarkably good (e.g., the WAY he introduces Kirchhoff's laws, p.33-47), and the typos ARE astonishingly awful. Flip to page 202-203 for the very first Ohm's Law experiment, and he shows "3mA" where the value obviously must be "30mA". (And all of the mA values in his table are off by this same factor of ten.) And given the insanely vague depiction of the transformer coils for Experiment 10 on page 214 (which you plug into a wall socket!), I even agree with the reviewer who said publication of this book is "almost criminally negligent." On the other hand, one page earlier, Experiment 9 on LRC resonance is beautiful -- just the ticket. My advice: Although strictly speaking this is a "technical" book, try to read it only for its ideas, and avoid ALL the technical details like the plague. (Notice that no reviewer so far has said, "Instead I recommend that you buy XYZ which covers the same terrain sans aggravating errors." One suspects that there is no such book, and that's why this one persists, BIG warts and all.)

Although this has a very easy language for beginners, the errors on the diagrams and formulas can drive any newbie crazy. I've seen minor errors a lot, like error conversions from Kilo (10^3) to Mega (10^6) very often in the book, but when I've started looking the chapter about digital gates and got the example schema in the picture "26-7 A" in page 379 this almost killed me, I've tried for hours to find a reason on the example, until I found they simply forgot an inverter from the terminal B to the AND gate. I hope they can release a list of errors somehow so we can actually use this book as intended.

Several critical fundamentals are unexplained, and editing errors often pop up and terribly confuse the reader (or at least this reader).

This book is clearly written and I have used it as a textbook in a course I teach on the principles and history of radio that I have been giving at
U. Mass Lowell for over 10 years. The students are liberal arts majors who usually have had no calculus. The level of math in this book is appropriate for them. The author has done a disservice to his readers by not providing an address where he could be informed of errors and shortcomings that could have been easily corrected in subsequent printings. This textbook has already had a number of printings but the errors persist. Here are some problems that readers should know about:


On page 28 the author should tell you that when two resistors are in parallel the equivalent resistor is the product of the given resistances divided by their sum. Every technician, electrical engineer and radio ham knows this formula. On page 81 the author should provide the corresponding formula for capacitors in series: the product divided by the sum is the equivalent capacitance.

Hams and EE's know that for a radio wave the frequency in megahertz times the wavelength in meters is equal to 300. This should appear on page 534 where the author discusses the length of antenna elements.

There is a sign error on page 539 . The equation 37-2 should be
FO=RF + IF . See Paul Nahin's book on the science of radio. The formula for the inductance of a coil given on p. 110 yields the inductance in microhenries; the author says millihenries and he is wrong.
A. David Wunsch, ECE Dept. U Mass Lowell