Electricity Demystified [Paperback]

Stan Gibilisco (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0071439250 | ISBN-13: 978-0071439251 | Publication Date: January 21, 2005 | Edition: 1

Electricity is a strong topic for McGraw-Hill, as seen with our tremendous sales figures with the TAB list. The books sell well across nearly every channel, and are extremely well received internationally. "Electricity Demystified" is a self-teaching guide intended for anybody who wants to get familiar with the basic concepts of electricity, be it for a course, professional, or personal reasons. It is a pre-cursor to our much more in-depth title, "Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics", one of McGraw-Hill's most successful TAB titles, also by Stan Gibilisco.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

POWER UP YOUR UNDERSTANDING OF ELECTRICITY
Now anyone with an interest in electricity can master it -- without getting their wires crossed. In Electricity Demystified, best-selling science and math writer Stan Gibilisco provides an effective and painless way to improve your understanding of the electricity that powers so much of modern life.

With Electricity Demystified, you master the subject one simple step at a time -- at your own speed. This unique self-teaching guide offers quizzes and tests at the end of each chapter and section to pinpoint weaknesses, and a 70-question final exam to reinforce the entire book.

If you want to build or refresh your understanding of electricity, here's a fast, entertaining self-teaching course that's really electrifying! Get ready to:

• Understand what gives electricity its power
• Solve problems involving current, voltage, power, and resistance
• Grasp the connection between electricity and magnetism
• Discover how magnetic levitation works
• Learn about alternative electricity sources, such as solar energy and fuel cells
• Take a "final exam" and grade it yourself!

A fast, effective, and fun way to learn about electricity, Electricity Demystified is the perfect shortcut to a deeper understanding of one of the most powerful forces in our lives.

About the Author

Stan Gibilisco is one of McGraw-Hill's most prolific and popular authors. His clear, reader-friendly writing style makes his science books accessible to a wide audience, and his background in mathematics, electronics, and scientific research has given him a worldwide reputation as an editor of professional handbooks and textbooks. He is the author of Physics Demystified; Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics; and The Illustrated Dictionary of Electronics. Booklist named his McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Personal Computing a "Best Reference" of 1996.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Professional; 1 edition (January 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071439250
• ISBN-13: 978-0071439251
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #49,443 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Since he began writing full-time in 1981, Stan Gibilisco has become one of McGraw-Hill's most prolific technical authors. His reader-friendly writing style makes his science and mathematics books accessible to a global audience.

Stan's most popular works include "Physics Demystified," "Alternative Energy Demystified," "Statistics Demystified," "Calculus Know-It-All," and "Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics."

"Booklist" named Stan's "Encyclopedia of Electronics" as one of the best references of the 1980s, and cited his "Encyclopedia of Personal Computing" as one of the best references of 1996.

Stan maintains a Website at www.sciencewriter.net, where he has published explanations for chapter-ending quiz answers in some of his books. Follow the "Quiz Explanations" link.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb primer on electricity, excellent for self-study, November 12, 2008

By 

Charles Ashbacher (Marion, Iowa United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Electricity Demystified (Paperback)

This book is an excellent primer on the properties of electricity, the words used to describe it, how to work with it and compute the values of the descriptors. Using diagrams, formulas and worked examples, the reader is taken from the basics to the specifics of AC and DC electricity as well as the relationship between electricity and magnetism. A short set of questions is given at the end of each chapter and two major exams are included. Without question, this is the best beginning book on electricity that I have ever seen.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars what I wanted . . . demistified, October 31, 2009

By 

C. Dee Throckmorton (Independence, Utah) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Electricity Demystified (Paperback)

I desperately wanted a book from which to learn enough DC electricity to work my way around the simple complexity of solar panels.
The book was what I needed and more.
Gibelesco took the mind of this beginner and ran it thru with the abc's of DC. Even though I am 76, he made it easy to understand and memorize.
I have several of his other books, they are all written in the same straight foreward, shoot from the hip style.
Thank you so much for advertizing his material. I feel a loyalty to his work as I do to amazon books . . . enough to give you my credit card number
Thank you again
Dee Throckmorton.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars okay, but has errors, September 13, 2010

By 

tater tot - See all my reviews

This review is from: Electricity Demystified (Paperback)

This book does a pretty good job of explaining the concepts, and has helpful quizzes included to let the reader make sure he/she understands before moving on (each chapter has example questions with answers provided, and a quiz with the answers in an appendix in the back of the book). BUT- not all of the answers to the example questions are correct. Granted, nobody's perfect, but in a book such as this one there should be zero errors in the example questions. One instance is on p.62, where example problem 4-5 asks the reader to determine how much current a bank of batteries in parallel can provide. Even though only 1 page before the text had described how to determine this ("the sum of the branch currents"), the solution to the example problem adds up the voltages instead, and comes out with the wrong answer. There are a few other such cases in the book. If a reader does not have the background to be able to spot these errors, they're likely to be confused and discouraged as they try to sort things out. If a reader does have sufficient background, they're probably not going to be reading this book. I have to say the book suffers from lack of proper proofing prior to publication.