Make Electronics: Learning by Discovery

This is the best introduction to practical electronics I have found. It is clearly written and well illustrated and the suggested experiments are interesting and help you learn. The problem is that it is written with US suggestions for parts. There is a parts kit available from a US shipper for chapters 1-4 but it is expensive and the shipping costs significant especially if you get hit with customs/VAT. Instead I ordered nearly all the parts from Maplin: their GCSE component kit is an excellent start and then you only need to add a few switches and potentiometers. If you read ahead a few chapters you can find what you need and Maplin have a small minimum order quantity. I thought the last chapter got a little esoteric and the computing part has dated quickly. However all in all, I strongly recommend this. In case it helps others, I recommend as a next step: Hands on Electronics: A practical introduction to Analog and Digital Circuits by Kaplan and White. It deals very well with the bits this book skims over, particularly transitors and op amps. You will need a scope and will have to cobble together the right power supplies or buy an bench unit but there are good value versions available on Amazon (Rigol scope and Basetech BT-305 power supply are good). A good text book will also help. I resisted buying the bible, The Art of Electronics by HandH, for ages because it is ridiculously expensive and out of date, but finally succumbed and did not regret it. The explanations and exercises are outstanding and only the component lists and computing parts date really badly.

* Introduction This book is well bound with quality paper and the binding is excellent. The text is well sized for the pages. * Target audience? Its target audience i.m.h.o is anything from A level and upwards. To my mind this book has been written to help the following groups; the student who is coming to this for the first time and so is very well equipped with this book, or any student that's found these skills base is a bit rusty. * What's it best features? This book is another gem. There are places in your bookcases for down - to - earth, practical explanations of basic skills as explained within this rather wonderful book. Such as how to build discrete circuits on circuit boards with the ultimate in clarity using colour pictures and easier to comprehend explanations of, say, the well - known 555 timer using these skills and other designs, such as including transistors in circuits. The technical level has almost all the mathematical removed from the book, this to encourage the learner to concentrate on the clarity it going through to show. There are other books to help with the mathematical stuff. I read this book in two sittings and loved reading it. * Summary This book explains the fundamental electrical skills you need to know, but in the highly competitive studies you may feel embarrassed to admit you do not know already. I wish i had this book when i did my studies as it would have accelerated my progression in technical reports and practical circuit building and designing.

My 11 year old son received this as a birthday present as he had become interested in digital electronics - one of his school books had demonstrated a 'full adder' in comic-strip fashion and he decided he wanted to have a go and build one for himself. The book is well illustrated and has some excellent photographs of the components you'll be using. The writing style is easy to follow and in-depth background information is included in optional sections. I like the way that the circuits being built evolve from things held together with crocodile clips which are easy to put together quickly through the use of breadboards and on to soldered projects building skills and knowledge on the way. One minor criticism is that although the author lists the parts needed for projects at the start of each section it isn't always that clear how vital they are to the main thrust of the book, some are only there to be destroyed and some for one side project. As to the audience of the book, my son has loved it. We are about a third of the way through and he was thrilled with his first breadboard project, a siren with two stage amplification built from transistors. He is looking forward to the later parts where he starts to play with logic gates and can make his full-adder, but also to making a little amplifier for his MP3 player. As an American book it can be tricky to find the exact match for some of the parts and it is worth shopping around for internet based sellers for the components. I'd estimate that we've spent about £50 on parts so far (thank goodness he got some Birthday money!) and that should cover the first half to two thirds of the book. Costs can be cut by not buying project boxes and using bits and pieces from around the house. Overall I'd recommend this book, I've learned a lot from it and my son has thoroughly enjoyed it, more so than the Cambridge Brainbox style of clip together electronic kits that he had tried before.

I can't recommend this book enough for people who are looking for a basic and practical introduction to electronics. The book focuses on learning through experience and encourages the reader to experiment with the circuits within the book. It provides a strong non technical explanation for each component and its functionality and helps the reader grasp the concepts through provided test circuits. The writer then continues to provide a bit of background depth into the theory if the reader desires to learn a bit more about the component in question. Starts with basic concepts, for example: Lighting an LED, relay switching transistor switching and some soldering and hardware guides. Then continues onto circuits involving ICs, including a section on programmable microcontrollers. Pros: Easy to understand and well written No mathematics required which makes it accessible for everyone Practical guides and circuit diagrams Cons: Appears to be aimed at younger students (High School) Lacks technical depth (This is expected as it is an introduction to electronics)

I attended a 3 week 'intro to electronics' course some years back which cost my employer £1500. Upon completion I discovered that I had learned practically nothing useful. Got this book today and three hours later I have a fair understanding of the basic principles, and have already completed a few actual experiments. The book cost me £20, whereas the course cost £1500 and took me out of work for 3 weeks at a further cost in lost time. You do the maths. Actually....belay that. Forget the maths. Leap forwards and buy the book. Do the practicals, then marvel at how easily you WILL understand. Have lots of fun doing it, emerge triumphant with new found skills + enthusiasm to delve deeper. Of course, I shall put my calculator to more robust work soon. But the fact is you DON'T need to endure a bewildering blinding with theory or complicated algebra in order to get underway. You just need this book, and a willingness to stump up a very modest outlay. What are you waiting for?....just do it :)

I'm about halfway through this book, which I read first to get an idea of what its all about, and now I'm so enthused I have pre-bought all the bits and pieces. My woodwork shed is now an electronics shed too! Be aware that to follow along you're going to need hardware, components, tools etc and you're going to end up spending a significant amount of money on it in the end. But that is what a hobby is for isn't it? Apart from the 'slippery slope' warning, this book really spells out the basics in clear language Its a little bit US centric though for us Europeans, (I couldn't find a PUT anywhere, until I discovered they are also called FETs), so maybe some alternative names would be nice, and metric conversions where necessary (22 guage wire is 0.33mm2), or even a special European Edition. If you're interested in learning the basics of electronics and you're a kinesthetic learner like me, this book is the one for you.

I'm echoing the positives that everyone here has mentioned about the content, presentation, and writing style of this book. However, the main emphasis on this book is actually *building* the projects. The author provides product codes for the American RadioShack franchises for 90% of the shopping lists in the book. Good luck trying to find the equivalents from Maplins, as some of the times he wants you to get quite specific transistors. Buying what you need isn't cheap. The electronic components themselves are fairly cheap, but they do mount up. What's expensive is a digital multimeter (cheapest you can get is £9), wire cutters(£4-5), strippers(£4-5) -- actual tools. The author clearly states that electronics is a cheap hobby. The makers of this book (Maker Shed) provide 3 pre-selected boxes of components and tools to accompany the projects in this book. Without postage, that costs about £183. They then want £39 postage for 1 box -- so in total for the 3 boxes (components x2, tools x1 to complete the whole projects in the book) - £300. Even doing the first project in this book (building a small battery circuit with lemons) is going to cost you at least £50.

VERY good book, I'm extremely pleased that I bought it. It shows basic electronics in a very easy to digest way and guides the reader through a series of experiments to further cement the lessons message. The book is filled with illustrations that helps to grasp the concepts that are explained. I'm a marine engineer and certified high power electrical engineer, dealing in MW transformers and powerplants, so I understand the electrical laws of physics well. But I've not fiddled around much with small electronics stuff like this and it's a great book for learning small electronics, even though you're not a beginner in electrical theory. I own many books already on electrical theory, but none are as practical as this one. I've also bought some books on magnetism and oscilloscopes and I hope they're as well written and well illustrated as this one. Great piece of work, Mr. Platt.

it is good for beginers as it contains just experiments and teaches us with those experiments.its name suits it certainly.l really love it.its good but canbe best if contains some more information than experiments.l mean to say same amount of experiment and some more information so just 4 stars

This is a very well-written text which is fun an entertaining to read, with an abundance of illustrations (breadboard diagrams, circuit diagrams, photos) -- take a look inside and you'll see. This may be the most fun and rewarding book on the subject of electronics; it certainly is of all the books I've seen. I've tinkered with electronics since I was about 10, and there are some things which I understood from the beginning, and others that I'm still a little unsure about. I didn't become an electronics engineer from reading the book, but it definitely made a lot of things much clearer to me, and it also makes me want to dive in building all kinds of circuits again (I've not done much in the recent past). The text achieves a perfect balance between adressing non-engineer people and also going deep enough, teaching you to build and understand real devices/applications and not just toys. There is little theory, but always enough so that you may understand how a component works, on a pragmatic level. The text is written in a very concise, pragmatic, clear language. This makes it fun to read; and it is never boring. The author explains many basic electronics concepts by demonstrating them in a number of practical projects (which, of course, is the most sensible approach). These are not just recipes; you get very detailed instructions how to build the projects, but you also learn how the parts work (by themselves, and in a circuit); and why you would choose one solution or part over another. After reading the book, I found it much easier to understand circuits, to read circuit diagrams, and I am now a lot more confident about the subject, and I now consider myself knowledgeable enough to build circuits that I previously thought I could never build, let alone understand. The book covers both analog and digital circuits, and just enough of both to allow you to take it from there and get to the really meaty stuff. (For instance, the digital counter built from "low-level" integrated circuits, which I would never have attempted to build because I always thought it's too hard. I now know that it's actually quite easy, and it is very possible to understand digital circuits on the lowest hardware level.) The last chapter is about building a simple robot that is controlled by a PIC microcontroller. If you've used an Arduino, you might think that you won't be able to build anything without the comfort and abstraction that the Arduino environment provides, but you will be enlightened to see that it's rather easy to program a microcontroller directly and interface it with other components. (I had previously avoided PIC because I thought they were much harder to handle than AVRs, but again I learned that this is not so.) Unless you're an electronics engineer or a very experienced hardware tinkerer/professional, buy this book. You will have a fun time reading it and you will learn many things, but the best is that you'll get excited to start lots of new hardware projects. I'd like to congratulate Charles Platt on this book -- this is one of the finest examples of making seemingly hard and complex subjects easy and fun.

Best book I've ever read on electronics. A lot of books focus almost exclusively on theory with very little practical knowledge. What I really liked about the book is that it started with practical knowledge and without you realizing you're learning the theory. The book is extremely well written and the instructions and examples are really easy to follow. Each chapter also includes the list of items you will need to complete each chapter. I cannot say enough about this book. If you want to learn about electronics on your own, to me this is the starting book bar none. It's not a university textbook full of theory and diagrams, but rather a down and dirty into building actual circuits that do something. And everything is explained along the way. Great book!

Muito bom. A forma prática de ensino proposta pelo autor é estimulante. Um bom início para quem deseja aprender eletronica.

Per un perfetto neofita questo manuale farà miracoli. La scuola anglosassone ti catapulta attraverso la pratica in mezzo alla materia. Provare, distruggere, riparare per capire i concetti base. Il libro è strutturato in base a esercitazioni di difficoltà crescente, che passo a passo guidano il lettore alla comprensione delle leggi base dell'elettricità, ai componenti più comuni dell'elettronica e al loro uso. Consiglio vivamente di reperire in anticipo una lista dei componenti che servono nel libro per poter da subito cominciare con gli esperimenti. Altrimenti prima di cominciare a leggerlo comprate i componenti in modo da non rovinarvi il piacere di seguire le esercitazioni quando ne avete voglia.