in 111 Books in 2011

#87/111: Make: Electronics

(Picture by Rain Rabbit)

The book

Firstly, I forgot to take a photograph, therefore I use this picture by Rain Rabbit from flickr.

I wanted to refresh my electronics knowledge and decided to work through this book. Charles Platt introduces you gently into electronics, beginning with measuring current up to building your own robot car. About the first half of this book is pretty good, however lacking lots of rather important theory. That is, if you never heard the theory before and want to dive deeper into electronics, you should consider reading other books. If you’re just a hobbyist who wants to build some stuff, this book and some googling should be sufficient. A big problem for many people is the high start up costs for electronics in contrast to programming which this book doesn’t really consider. Especially in the last quarter of the book you had to invest hundreds of dollars to build your stuff, which isn’t really acceptable. In conclusion, if you want to dive into electronics this book is pretty neat however if you just want to refresh your knowledge, you should look into more theoretical books like Basic Circuit Analysis. If you’re completely new to electronics, one of these electronics kits would probably be a better choice.

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