Here's my review of 'Electronics for Dummies'. It's part of the dummies series of books which assume you know nothing and tries to teach you in simple ways.
As a 'Dummy' when it comes to electronics I found the book a really helpful first start. And would recommend it to others.
Pros:
- Good value for money. This book cost me about £20 and is about 600 pages long with online extras included.
- Simple and builds knowledge progressively. The book builds chapter by chapter so you learn things like Ohms law and then go on to understand resistors, capacitors and LEDs for example. Everything is explained using simple language.
- Lots of projects to practice and learn from. The book gets you to build circuits which demonstrate the principles it has just taught you.
- A little bit of everything. The book covers a broad range of subjects to give you a good basic knowledge.
Cons:
- Some errors. There were a few errors I detected in the book, usually units being listed wrongly or a calculation being done wrongly. Although i detected these errors, these could be confusing for others (and where for me at first)
- Dedicates a lot of space to Stamp basic microprocessors. As far as I can tell the Rasberry PI and the Arduino are the standard in this area now so it seems odd that the book looks at an older processor. That being said the introduction to microprocessors was still useful.
- Sometimes leaves you wanting more. I had to do follow up research online to get a full understanding of things. Sometimes the book would simply state that a component e.g. a capacitor between two chained 555 timers should be used without explaining why. In addition certain deeper topics such as radio and op amps didn't have a huge amount of depth of explanation. I assume this is because they didn't want to go beyond the limits of the dummies simplicity.
Overall for me the books greatest strength (beginners simplicity) was also it's weakness as I often wanted to go further. That being said it is supposed to be a get you started text so I'd say it more than achieves it's aim. I'm certainly pleasantly surprised at how much i've learnt.
As a 'Dummy' when it comes to electronics I found the book a really helpful first start. And would recommend it to others.
Pros:
- Good value for money. This book cost me about £20 and is about 600 pages long with online extras included.
- Simple and builds knowledge progressively. The book builds chapter by chapter so you learn things like Ohms law and then go on to understand resistors, capacitors and LEDs for example. Everything is explained using simple language.
- Lots of projects to practice and learn from. The book gets you to build circuits which demonstrate the principles it has just taught you.
- A little bit of everything. The book covers a broad range of subjects to give you a good basic knowledge.
Cons:
- Some errors. There were a few errors I detected in the book, usually units being listed wrongly or a calculation being done wrongly. Although i detected these errors, these could be confusing for others (and where for me at first)
- Dedicates a lot of space to Stamp basic microprocessors. As far as I can tell the Rasberry PI and the Arduino are the standard in this area now so it seems odd that the book looks at an older processor. That being said the introduction to microprocessors was still useful.
- Sometimes leaves you wanting more. I had to do follow up research online to get a full understanding of things. Sometimes the book would simply state that a component e.g. a capacitor between two chained 555 timers should be used without explaining why. In addition certain deeper topics such as radio and op amps didn't have a huge amount of depth of explanation. I assume this is because they didn't want to go beyond the limits of the dummies simplicity.
Overall for me the books greatest strength (beginners simplicity) was also it's weakness as I often wanted to go further. That being said it is supposed to be a get you started text so I'd say it more than achieves it's aim. I'm certainly pleasantly surprised at how much i've learnt.
