Customer Reviews

Circuit Design: Know It All (Newnes Know It All)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you've done a lot of reading, or have an education in electronics then little here will be new, but that's not the point. Whenever I focus on any one topic, all the others grow a little stale, and this is the perfect book to freshen them back up.

It covers all of basic Electronics in enough detail to both satisfy and be useful, and despite multiple subjects written by multiple authors, the book hangs together tightly. It absolutely didn't have much sense of an anthology where it is obvious that chapters were written in different eras, and from the looks of it, in different languages. Newness Circuit Design is NOT that book.

Yet Circuit Design is an anthology. I don't have any idea of how they put it together so it flows from chapter to chapter as if written by a single person at a single sitting, albeit deathly long. Newness either edited multiple chapters from previous works so tightly that they seamlessly join together, or this is the first book I've read of bare editorial genius. If not a word has been changed from the originals, then the editor who picked each piece to meld with the one before and after is flatly amazing, an editor the likes of which I've never seen nor even imagined.

In short, Newness Circuit Design is a great single book that covers vast stretches of Electronics knowledge in a highly readable way, deep enough that I was sated after each chapter, yet not so deep as to pull me under 200 meters of details without air. After safely returning to the surface on occasion, I always know where to go to find the hard math beneath the covered topic, if I feel the need. I assume a Quick-Study beginner would be able to find them easily as well.

--Tony

I spend a lot of time writing about technology, including books, magazine articles, and suchlike. (If you do a search on Amazon.com for "Clive Maxfield" you'll find a few of my humble offerings scattered around.)

This means that I tend to be a bit of a harsh critic when it comes to reading "stuff" written by other folks. One thing I hate is having a big pile of books and not being able to find the fact I'm looking for in any of them. By comparison, one thing I love is finding a single book that contains lots and lots of juicy information. Circuit Design Know It All falls into this latter category.

As for the other members of the Know-It-All series, the publisher has pulled together material from a group of well-known engineer-writers, each of whom have focused on the area of their expertise. Even in "Chapter 1: Fundamentals" I discovered reams of stuff I'd long-forgotten, and there are 43 chapters jam-packed with interesting subjects to peruse and ponder. Topics range from diodes and transistors, analog design, digital design, analog and digital layout, high-speed logic, operational amplifiers, sensors, filters, radio frequency (RF) circuits, programmable logic, microprocessors and microcontrollers, power supplies, batteries, safety, testability, reliability... the list goes on and on...

There are other books that go into more depth on each of these topics, but they tend to be "overkill" and wear me down unless I absolutely need to know information to that (excruciating) level of detail. Alternatively, there are a lot of books that attempt to cover a wide range of topics, but that cover them so "thinly" that they are all but useless. Circuit Design Know It All falls into the middle ground; the topics are covered at sufficient depth to be useful without descending into minutia that make my brains want to leak out of my ears.

When I'm writing, I have a select number of books that I keep on my desk for use as a quick reference. Circuit Design Know It All has just joined this pile.

This book appears to be a collection of material found in other publications from the various authors of this title. In a single volume it presents a good overview of circuit design. I personally would have liked to seen more rigorous treatment in certain chapters however I realize that this book was probably written to reach the broadest audience for this subject.

As an electrical engineer who spends my time in the analog as well as the digital world, this book is gold. As mentioned previously, this book is not an exhaustive resource for any single topic, but it presents each topic in such a manner that, if you require, you can actually speak intelligently about what you are looking for.

For example, there is a very good section on numerical systems that explains the way math is performed in binary. Great refresher for some of us, great introduction for others, but if you want to do signed-fractional or floating point math in a DSP (one of my recent topics at work), then this book will give you all of the background you require in order to intelligently search for the deeper answers that you are looking for.

I let my boss borrow this for a few days and he called it the next Art of Electronics (anyone who is into electronics for any length of time knows this title). I'm not sure I would go that far, but for a measly $50, you get a comprehensive guide to all things electronics from a very knowledgeable list of authors. Look through the table of contents and the list of authors. Google the authors if you must and notice that each is a well-known expert in their respective fields. Each chapter was specifically assigned to the authors based on their fields of expertise.

If you only have $50 and need a great resource that covers all of the topics you might run into, buy this book,

J

I find the book very useful and am glad I have it. It does have some misprints that can be interpreted from the context.

In the first 19 pages of Chapter 1 I found 4 typographical errors that would be very misleading to those not schooled in electronics. How many more will appear in later chapters that are not as obvious? I would stay away from this book!