THE ART OF ELECTRONICS (Horowitz & Hill) 3rd ed: Still the best?

Dear Colin, The Art of Electronics (Horowitz & Hill) 3rd ed... ... as DIYers probably already know is now out, only 25 years after the 2nd ed. My copy arrived today.

I'm not trained in electronics and make no claim to more than a passing knowledge, but have enjoyed these authors' style of presentation since the first edition. Not meant for degree level but with decent depth explanations, and with a practical bias which has made it the practitioners' bible. Useful when trying to understand how thing work.

Not for valve aficionados (solid state circuits only) and at 1192 pages not for a quick read but in my view a worthwhile addition to the bookshelf/workbench. What’s your view?

I have four copies of "The Art of Electronics" it's a OK book but is typical one man one job USA style and never thinks you out of the box. All the young engineers I have trained in the past, I've tried to get them to think of other solutions and even go and look at electronic history and see what was done with what we would call now primitive parts.

For example when I was working for a Solid State Relay company based in San Diego and Mexico their solution on this 1960's design was to add filter to reduce the EMC. As a consultant and not locked into one man one job mode as my fellow designer where, I decided to solve the problem of noise at source. The Noise was due to zero crossing non conduction of the back to back thyristors around the 1.4-2.3VAC.

I solved it with a 5 terminal device using FET's and Thyristors, this problem bugged me for many year after so I revisited it when I had a slack work year (self employed) and came up with 4 terminal fit and replace solution this reduced the noise from 140dB to 20dB with no filters, the limit is 50dB. The I sold the patent to Root 2 Ltd. have a look here http://www.root2.ltd.uk/

So the teaching books are good but you do need to be thinking in a different way to come up with new ideas, i.e. Tellurium Q cables always go back to basic if stuck for inspiration.

Thank you for the question.

Colin

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