Make: Electronics: Learning by Discovery: A hands-on primer for the new electronics enthusiast

Product Description
The first edition of
Make: Electronics established a new benchmark for introductory texts. The second edition enhanced that experience, and now this third edition includes all-new diagrams throughout, new photographs, and completely rewritten text.
Learning by Discovery is a system developed by Charles Platt to enable an experience that is fascinating, fun, and memorable. You learn by building your own circuits--and by making your own mistakes.
In fact, mistakes are an important part of the experience. The book encourages you to "burn things out and mess things up" to find out for yourself the limits of electronic components. You'll blow a fuse and watch an overloaded LED, and you can cut open a relay to see how it works inside.
Affordable
Component Kits are available from independent suppliers (on Amazon), or the book explains how to shop online yourself.
Illustrations are in
full color throughout, so you'll see exactly what you need and how to use it.
While
Make: Electronics minimizes the amount of theory that you need, it does show you how to figure out Ohm's Law and do the simple math to calculate the time constant of a capacitor.
A buying guide shows basic tools ranging from pliers to a low cost multimeter. A simple "finger test" demonstrates how transistors switch or amplify current. You can solder wires, if you wish, to build a permanent circuit, although soldering is not necessary to build all the circuits in the book.
You'll see how to use integrated circuit chips to create a simple circuit that tests the speed of your reflexes. Other circuits include a combination lock for a computer, or a game in which players compete to be the first to press a button.
All the basic concepts are demonstrated quickly and simply with affordable components. You'll discover resistance, capacitance, voltage, amperage, inductance, and the relationship between electricity and magnetism.
Ideal for Beginners
This book assumes that you have no prior knowledge. It explains each concept in meticulous detail, and is friendly, patient, and fun. Positive reader feedback has been received from people ranging in age from 8 to 84. If you only buy one book about electronics, this should be the one.
Review
Exceptional praise for previous editions:
"This is teaching at its best!" --Hans Camenzind, inventor of the 555 timer (the world's most successful integrated circuit).
"A fabulous book: well written, well paced, fun, and informative. I also love the sense of humor. It's very good at disarming the fear. And it's gorgeous. I'll be recommending this book highly." --Tom Igoe, author of
Physical Computing and
Making Things Talk.
A
"magnificent and rewarding book. ... Every step of this structured instruction is expertly illustrated with photos and crisp diagrams. . . . This really is the best way to learn." --Kevin Kelly, in
Cool Tools.
You may not see many Amazon Customer Reviews yet for the Third Edition. But there are more than a thousand here for the Second Edition:
amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Learning-Through-Discovery/dp/1680450263/ref=sr_1_5
From the Author
When I was a teenager, I wanted to build circuits but didn't know how. I had to spend hours reading technical texts which were not written for hobbyists and were difficult to understand.
Make Electronics is the book that I wish I'd been able to read, back then.
About the Author
Charles Platt is a contributing editor and regular columnist for Make: magazine, where he writes about electronics and tools. Platt was a senior writer for Wired magazine, has written various computer books, and has been fascinated by electronics since he put together a telephone answering machine from a tape recorder and military-surplus relays at age 15. He lives in a Northern Arizona wilderness area, where he has his own workshop for prototype fabrication and the projects that he writes about for Make: magazine.