Components Books

This book ist not too different in quality from Nilsson, quite normal; some topics are explained okay, others lack a bit of depth in derivation. But the problems are not very fun to solve.

This is by far the worst college textbook I've ever had to use and I don't know why any college would still use it. It was required for my electric circuits engineering class, which unfortunately, I decided to take online. This book was no help at all. It not only doesn't explain the basic electronic concepts in a clear way, but it hardly shows how to solve any relevant problems. The problems it does provide, it provides no solutions for and for the few problems it provides the answers to, it doesn't even show how to solve them to obtain those solutions. I had to end up using my calculus and physics books to be able to answer most of my assignment problems.

If you want a book that holds your hand and babies you through circuit theory, than this book is not for you. Mastery of advanced calculus, and calculus based physics is necessary.

Having said that, being able to understand what is in this book will set you apart from an EET. You use this book because you want to be an EE. (You know, the guy who is the EET's boss. hehe)

This is a well presented book for a skilled enginering student.
You will know more about circuit theory than the average joe tech will ever know.

Saying you can't understand this book is like saying you can't understand Advanced Quantum Mechanics because it has too much math.

Don't be a baby. Just take your 3 semesters of calculus w/ differential equations and 2 semesters of calculus based physics
and then and only then will you be ready for this book. When you are done with this book, you will be a certified EE genius :)

And tell the EET's that they will be working for you. HEHE.

"Electric Circuits," 6th Edition by Dorf and Svoboda rates as the WORST text I've ever used in my undergraduate or graduate training. While it has many helpful tables and illustrations, the core-material presentation is garbled and not easily understood. This is complicated further by an inexcusable plethora of errors contained throughout the text. Though the authors are obviously knowledgeable in the subject matter, from me they earn a grade of "F" for their ability as writers. When used as an adjunct or self-learning text, where the student's knowledge comes directly from the textbook and without the aid of live lectures, this book is useless.

The following three textbooks cover the SAME material as Dorf and are much better suited as adjunct and self-learning texts. These are presented in the order of recommendation to you: (Monier is by far the best of all)

1. "Electric Circuit Analysis," by Charles J. Monier, 2001, Prentice Hall.

This text is EXCELLENT. As the chapter material and the math progress in complexity (up to LaPlace Transforms) the author inserts "math review chapters," which are especially helpful. The material is presented clearly and in an exact fashion in this book.

2. "Electric Circuits," by Alenander and Sadiku

3. "Introductory Circuit Analysis," by Robert L. Boylestad

Unless you're taking a lecture course directly from the authors or have access to a professor familiar with all the errors and quirks of this text, don't waste your time with it.

Disclaimer: I have no financial or business relationship or interests in any of the texts discussed here.

This is the worst book to teach basic foundation skills to future electrical engineers. It assumes that readers are genuises and is definitely not for beginners. It is very difficult to follow and understand. The examples are mediocre and the problems are difficult. It omits key steps in solving some of the problems. It's exponentially frustrating when your university prescribes it as a textbook.(Did the course coordinators even try to read it from a beginner's point of view?) It's only good as a doorstop, paper weight, a projectile to throw at a non-sensical, pretentious PhD student teaching the class(or at least that's what he/she thinks they're doing), or in extreme cases, a toilet paper. Horrible book! Good for bonfires though.

I hate this book, it is not helpful, doesn't translate a lot of the exercises or examples so you don't really learn anything, you have to really search for the vocab, translation, grammer instructions, or even what chapter you are in. Bad book. Buy "Genki".

This book does not teach at a fast pace at all. When I completed just one semester of Japanese I already amassed 3Xs the vocabulary than what it has presented in this book. If you want to study at a slower pace then go ahead and get this. It does possess some properties that make it not totally bad but remeber that there are also better, CHEAPER, books out there. If you are studying outside of a class atmosphere using either a Japanese friend or the internet chatrooms you will have better luck with this book than a normal text.

Actually, it's a fairly good book, but certain parts really make my head hurt. (as the above topic says) I'll start out with the good.

It has a decent amount of material. Approx 700-800 native words and non-english based loanwords, and around 200 required kanji, with perhaps 500 more shown. I'm glad that it touches Kanji, because many worse textbooks avoid it altogether for Japanese 1-2 (college) or Japanese 1. (HS) Like many people here, I was a serious language learner before I started taking the class, so the first semester was ridiculously easy, with a few of the Kanji being the main new material.

The classroom exercises are logical and good practice. I had lots of fun talking back and forth with classmates, especially because lots of them were just getting into it, heehee. They're valuable and sensible for functioning as a tourist in Japan, at least. Later chapters are more useful for those who plan on an extended visit, the closest to a "useless" chapter being the part in chapter 5 with terms to refer to your own family with. My family has no interest with Japan, it's only useful for plays/TV/RPGs or knowing what your host family's saying. =p

However, the most awkward aspect of the book was the romaji. Romaji is the term for the alphabetical representation of Japanese. Their version of romaji would represent ‚¨‚¤ and ‚¨‚¨ as "oo", along with ei/ee, which only causes confusion later when you switch to the kanas (japanese "alphabets") and have to remember which ones had special "rules." This is done to make them look closer to their pronunciations, and is completely unnecessary, because ‚¨‚¤ could have easily been ou.

The tapes themselves have a rough learning curve. After the first part or so, the speech goes straight to its maximum, native-like speed seen throughout the rest of the book. This leaves listeners running the tape over and over, no matter how well they can understand the sensei.

Harsh criticism aside, it's still a pretty good book, I'd have voted 3.5 stars if I could. My college could have easily chosen much worse.

I've read a lot of negative reviews for this book so I wanted to write an article in defense. I'm in my second year of Japanese right now at a community college. This book is definitely not for those who are studying by themselves. But it is one of the best Japanese textbooks I've seen on the market. A lot of textbooks use romaji (or as another reviewer put it cheatagana). This one doesn't except at the beginning. I think almost any really serious student of Japanese will tell you romaji is a terrible thing. It slows down language aquistion and it is hard to find books about learning Japanese that don't use romaji.

All in all, this is a very useful textbook. If you have a good Japanese-sensei you will find your self picking up the language at a very respectable rate while using this book. The amount of vocabulary is a little much in a few places, but that is my only complaint.

If you can you might want to try and get a package that includes the workbook and both sets of audio CDs (textbook and workbook audio) to make the best use of "Yookoso! An Invitation to Contemporary Japanese".

I studied Japanese for about one year before taking the class. I have used several language texts, including ones that teach in kana/kanji and in roomaji. All of them were superior to Yookoso. I am not exaggerating when I say that this text is inferior to the others.

First, the organization of the chapters makes very little sense. The book tries to put things into vocabulary-based chapters and fails miserably at keeping things from fragmenting. After all, most of the grammar exercises are unrelated to the overall theme of the chapters; that is, the constructions provided do not correspond well with the ideas presented by the theme for the chapter. Moreover, the grammar exercises themselves appear to be fragmented--grammar points are covered, the text moves on, and they pop up again later in the chapter. Nothing seems to blend together and nothing builds upon what has been learned. At least, not as much as in other texts.

Yookoso's fragmented set-up is not its only problem. It often gives little or no explanation of the grammar points, merely throwing out one or two examples in lieu of a more detailed lesson. I realize that this is a classroom text, but every other classroom text I've used was superior in its explanations and examples. The grammar is addressed with examples of a grammar construction and a sentence or two explaining the basic uses in the Japanese language of said construction. Despite this, the evolution of such a construct, methods for combining grammar constructs, and more detailed examples are omitted. This text tries to distill the major points and in this, it succeeds. However, the lab manual does not merely ask for the basics. It asks for complex sentences when the examples themselves are so base that it FEELS like a textbook rather than living language. In other words, Yookoso provides simple, elementary sentences and demands complexity from students later in the laboratory portion.

Language must be presented so that the techniques can be mimicked. If I'd mimicked Yookoso, I wonder what the results would be.

The book is quite okay concerning the explaining and teaching, and considering it's an introduction. (If you want diodes, transistors, etc search elsewhere! (Sedra/Smith?))

But the thing is: each of the fifteen chapters has about 70 exercises. And if you began learning this stuff, you know it: you'll always forget a term in the equations or switch a minus for a plus sign, etc.. The solutions are not on the book, but they do exist, and if your an instructor you may log in the site and ask for a copy.

If you're a student . . . it's actually even easier! Just get it on isoHunt or eMule and start working the problems.

Believe me, do half of each chapter's exercises and you'll breeze through your exam. Check or learn the correct answer on the Instructor's Manual.



P.S. - I really understand all the one-star ratings, but it's just because this is a subject where you need lots of practice, lots of exercises. And of course if you're trying to study and you're stuck on one exercise, you probably won't go further, and exasperate.. But go get the answers, and good work! You'll see the book will give you all the theory and explaining necessary.

Like the title itself says, this is an introductory book on Circuit Analysis. In the first year of my engineering graduation, I used this book for the subject of Basic Circuit Analysis and found it to be extremely helpful. I think I can even say that this book made my life a lot easier, since the author - J. David Irwin - did a very good job on explaining concepts and circuit analysis basic methods and laws very clearly.

The book is very well structred, objective and and the subjects are easily understandable for the reader with little or none electronic circuit knowledge: every chapter starts with an introduction and a list of helpful topics which the author named "Learning Goals"; then, everytime a new concept/law/method is introduced, the author tests the reader to see if he did comprehend what has been explained to him by presenting him with very basic exercices, "Learning by Doing"; the author also provides the reader with "Learning Hints" on a regular basis, which can be interpreted as algorithms to solve certain problems or simple hints for the reader to do the exercice correctly, avoiding typical mistakes; at last, when a resonable amount of concepts have been introduced, the book features many "Learing Examples" with resolutions (note that resolutions can be of an extreme importance when the reader cannot understand how a certain problem is solved).

«Basic Engineering Circuit Analysis» covers everything that a book of this kind (introductory book) should cover, and even more, all in a clear way: basic concepts (quantities and electrical elements), resistive circuits (where the ohm and kirchhoff's laws are introduced), circuit analysis techniques (nodal and loop analysis), equivalent circuits (superposition, thévenin and norton's theorems), capacitance and inductance, first and second-order transcient circuits, AC steady-state analysis, magnetically coupled networks, steady-state power analysis, polyphase circuits, variable frequency network performance, the laplace and fourier tranforms (and applications to circuit analysis - e.g. bode diagrams), two-part networks and basic semiconductor circuits (diodes and transistors).

In my opinion, this is an excelent book for everyone who wants to study the basics of electrical circuit analysis. I highly recommend it for that purpose.

This book was awful. Concepts are confusing, examples are lacking, and most of the homework problems do not represent the material taught in the revelant chapter.

This book is terrible in getting across concepts and procedures relating to a variety of problems. One or two examples didn't help me work 20 hw problems, and on top of this the solutions aren't in the back of the book. you have to go on their website to get any supplementary material (which sucks just as bad). It will take forever just to get started on the homework problems because you will have to figure out how it even related to what was read in the chapter.

This is the book we're reading in my first EE class, and it sucks. Maybe if I had a great professor that actually taught and walked us through the practice problems it wouldn't be so frustrating, but he doesn't, and it makes trying to go through the book EXTREMELY difficult.

There are huge gaps in information that show up in assigned problems, which I understand can help reinforce the learning process, but there are books that do it effectively and then there's this piece of crap.

The authours of this steaming pile of cow waste leave out important details that can cost a student literally hours in trying to figure out a solution only to discover that the reason for the incorrect answer is because the book failed to mention ANYTHING that might be helpful.

I can't relate how many times I went online and actually looked up information in OTHER books that were 1000000 times better than this POS.

An example, you ask? On the section on combining independent current sources, it mentions (in about 2 sentences) that current sources should be combined when in parallel. That's fine and dandy, but what it doesn't tell you is that when you're doing ANY PROBLEM where current is in question, you've got to add any current sources BACK in to the answer, depending on where they appear in the circuit, or you'll get garbage as a result.

Is this common sense? Sure, I guess, if you've already taken the class and already understand circuit analysis. If you haven't and you don't, the authors apparently decided to leave you up s@#t creek without a paddle after robbing you blind.

If you're taking an EE class and see that this is the text, check out the professor before you take it, or you'll be sorry.

I am forced to buy this book because my class requires it. Otherwise I wouldn't have bought this book. I can get better than or as good as this book for quarter of its price. The answer to problems doesn't come with the book (not a SINGLE solution to any of the problems) so there's no way of checking if you're finding a corrent solution to the problem which is most important aspect of learning. SO WATCH OUT BEFORE YOU BUY! (As u know most science books provide a odd number solutions to check the answers to problems and teachers give even number problem for HW) The link on the book promises student problem companion, but I had to purchased it for extra 17.95$ to get it, but very few problems with solutions (5-6 problems per chapter) were offered. In other words I am ripped again. So every moment I use this book I smelled a greed for money. The website for this is confusing and unhelpful and resources that seems useful are priced. In the end I would recomment anything other rather than this book for someone who is serious about studying electronics.

This is by far the best Microelectronics book I've ever read (and I have a large collection). The authors really dig deep into the material and explain every little step as you progress toward the bigger picture. I absolutely love this textbook. I recommend it to anyone who appreciates a technical read with rigorous and thorough mathematical derivations of equations that describe physical phenomena in microelectronic devices and materials.

I slept through all my lectures and got an A+ in the course because of this book. And no, I'm not from MIT and the authors of this book are not my professors.

THIS BOOK IS AWFUL!!!!!! I've never seen a textbook as terrible as this. Notice how the guy who gave it 5 stars is from MIT. I wouldnt be surprised if it Sodini himself. Nice try Charles, but your textbook is terrible.

This is the worst textbook that I have ever read. The authors make way too many assumptions in deriving their equations. Also, their approximations seem very sketchy and go without proper justification. All of these assumptions and approximations make it near impossible to understand anything, and so the student is just left with a bunch of meaningless equations. The end-of-chapter problems and excercises thus become just plug-and-chug, and they teach the student absolutely nothing about semiconductor devices. The problems are only difficult in that the student must search through the 150 or so gigantic equations in each chapter to find the correct one to plug the numbers into. No insight is gained.

Charles Sodini is a professor at MIT who teaches 6.012 (Microelectronic Circuits and Devices) and is the co-author of this book, which we use in his class.

The textbook is very well organized and gives very clear examples and numerous practice and design problems to play with. The derivations are easy to follow and the diagrams are well notated and complement the text.

6.012 is a one semester course at MIT covering all the topics discussed in the textbook. In addition to weekly problem sets (which are nothing more than the P problems from the textbook), the course is supplimented by a design project (similar to a design question you might find in chapter 13, but at a bigger scale), and two laboratories in device characterization (sadly, only available for MIT students). SPICE is used extensively.

Someone mentioned that the problems seem like plug-and-chug, but I think the book is trying to teach you intuition so when you handle realistic problems (such as those presented in the design project questions), you have an idea of how to approach it through rough hand-calculations and then follow up with more precise measurements in SPICE.

This is definitely a very good resource for some one interested in home construction of HF / VHF receivers and other Hamradio projects.

Though the schematics contain lots of obsolete integrated circuits, these chips were the best in the business in the 1975 - 1990 period, were used by most of the HF and military communications equipment manufacturers of that era.

However, most of the receiver architecture prior to year 2000 would appear outdated in todays context of software defined radios and DSP based filters.

The current breed of new engineers looking for a career in RF electronics might definitely benefit from the rudimentary but practical aspects brought out in this book, not withstanding the criticisms.

If you are already a seasoned RF Engineer, with this book in your collection, you would become a better Elmer.

This is a worthless book, replete with errors and very little information on RF circuit design.
Virtually every page contains erroneous diagrams, missing references, and the ensemble reads like a cut and paste from a series of magazine articles. Save your money and buy a decent book such as "Experimental Methods in RF Design" by Wes Hayward, Rick Campbell and Bob Larkin if you really want to learn some design techniques.

I agree with the other reviewers in the "Waste of paper" school, though I guess it's to be expected from TAB books, the worst publisher on the planet.

Strange that Cotter Sayre has given this a glowing review. Anonymously! Sure hope he's a better writer than reviewer, as his book is next in my pile!

I agree with other reviews in that there are many errors in the book which should have been discovered and corrected before printing. It's not one of the worst books on the subject, but certainly not the best. The book is fun to read but is short on depth. It actually reads like a bunch of magazine article reprints that have been collected and assigned a chapter with some extra stuff thrown in. Some chapters have a lot of detail and others completely gloss over the subject (just like some magazine articles I have read). If you are looking for a general introduction to RF principles, then this book is just OK. If you are ready to get the simulator going and design a real RF circuit, you will be a bit hard pressed to make progress.

As another reviewer wrote, "buy it used and buy it cheap." Well, I did, and _still_ feel cheated. After receiving it just this afternoon, and spending 15 minutes scanning through it, I have to say that TAB publishers, producer of this 3rd edition, obviously needs to clean house in their proofreading department, and the author, Joseph J. Carr needs to pay more attention to the galley proofs when they're sent out. Missing diagrams, wrong diagrams to match the diagram's text, and just plain wrong information renders this book untrustworthy, and therefore worthless. Amazon won't let me award zero stars so I am forced to give it one.

This book is good resource for this class as it has many examples and helpful Matlab coded examples. However for someone that is taking this course with no previous experience in to signals and/or system with average calculus skills, it will be very challenging. I would suggest a book that subscribes to a more basic level.

I had the extreme displeasure of having to use this book in an undergraduate course called Linear Signals and Systems. It is poorly written and laid out first off. The ideas and concepts are half formed and the proofs are all well over any student's head who has only had one class in differential equations (rendering them pointless, for it is intend for just such people). I would actually sit down sometimes, tell myself that the book couldn't be as bad as I had it pegged, and try to read over the material that had been covered in class to learn it. I always ended up flipping pages, frustrated, sure that I had missed a page or paragraph somewhere, but I never had. It's that bad. Don't buy this. I wound up selling it before the class was over and relying on my notes and my old Ciruits text book, which was quite good (it was also written incidentally by J. David Irwin, the head of our department).

I absolutely agree with Carey Witkov and Zaher Kassas, while completely disagreeing with most of the other reviews.

To learn formalized disciplines, any of them, from Signal Theory to Microeconomics to Fluid Dynamics to whatever you want, there is only *one* way: you *must* sit there, in front of the book, with your pencil and/or ballpen and your block of paper (white, if possible: since lines and squares tend to make you lose your concentration), and you have to spend your time, all the time you need, to go deeply through the ideas the book is trying to convey. In other words, *you-have-to-write*! Furthermore, you possibly (not necessarily: but, imho, it would nevertheless help very much) will have to derive yourself again *all* the formal deductions the authors use for arguing their theses: especially the obscure or hard ones. You'll have to, or at least you'll better try...

Of course, to get to all of these things, you have to be patient and to spend all the time you need until you'll be sure you actually have understood what you read. And how can you be sure you actually have? Simple: close the book, and try to sistematically rephrase and/or reformulate on your own what you've read, forcing yourself to *write* your personal deductions (especially the ones about the hard points) down on your nice block of white paper with your nice ballpen or pencil. And when you come to a point where you can't, you have to go back to your book and read the point again, patiently trying to understand *where*, in the pages before the hard point, something has gone wrong or the stream of logico-formal deductions of the author(s) has stopped flowing into your head, or has broken up along the way from the page to your mind. Could all these efforts require you to read other books, or look for more information in other places? Of course it could: otherwise, what kind of research activity would it be? For we must be clear: seriously studying a matter (*any* matter) IS a research activity.

Trying to learn (read) something which is formally structured and/or organized in an abstract fashion just like you would do if you were reading a novel simply doesn't work. You just *can't* learn mathematics (and all that) only by browsing through the books as if they were comics: and just reading and reciting in aloud voice isn't enough, if one really wants to grasp the essence, or the logic structure, of what one is reading.

Only after having subdued to such a discipline (yes: I think we just can call it so) one has the right to come here, or wherever else, and demolish a treatise. Never before! We're not talking about novels and science fiction ;)

Let me add a final consideration (which is general: that is, it applies more or less to the whole Amazon bookstore): this is the reason why, in my humble opinion, this whole system of allowing everybody to rate the books at his/her absolute discretion tends, in the very end, to be completely useless. Here, too, one should make any attempt, if anything, to separate his/her own personal experience - and maybe his/her own disgust for having been forced to study a specific tome just in order to pass an exam - from some kind of objective judgement. Otherwise, it's nothing more than a whining complaint.

Sorry ^___~

______________________________________
P.S. [30/01/2007] Then, there is the fact that this book, like most of the other books published by the five or six ultra-mega-global multimedia corporations (I mean: Springer - Kluwer, McGraw-Hill, and so on... you know the list) are *waaaay* too costly. *This* would be a real matter for an actual (and maybe also effective) campaign. Though, it's a completely different story ;)

Unlike texts that read like they have been compiled by cutting and pasting, this one reads like the authors are directly talking to you.
Some things I like about this text:

* It does not omit the hard stuff, like the inversion integral for laplace transforms so you don't have to rely only on transform tables.
* It includes topics not often found in introductory signals and systems texts like the chirp-z transform.
* It has several worked examples for each section and shows how to perform the calculations both by hand and using matlab.
* The end-of-chapter problems are doable.
* The approach taken in the text is a general systems approach and not a narrow circuits approach.

While everyone's entitled to their opinion many of the negative reviews appeared to be critical without substance.

I was really surprised by some of the negative comments written on this book, and that is why I decided to write this comment. This book was the one assigned to the undergraduate course I took entitled Signals and Systems. In fact, this book made me like communications and signal processing, and I believe that it motivated me a lot (beside the other book by Ziemer & Tranter entitled Principles of Communication Systems: Modulation, Noise, Systems, 4th edition) to go for the graduate studies in communications and signal processing. What I liked about the two books was that they assume NO prior knowledge of the topics covered and they move on smoothly from one subject to another so that the student will have a better understanding of the "big picture" as he/she moves on. Well, I guess that the other "negative" comments about this book were written by students who expected to understand the topics covered in this book from one skim read. Let me say that that is NOT the case here. In order to understand the topics covered very well, you should read them more than once and try to solve as many problems as possible. But trust me on this: once you do so, you will grasp the material very well and will have a "feel" of what is going on.

I think the book is good overall but I know I wasted a lot of time correcting the code exercises. If anyone has figured out how to get exercise 4.03 of the Remoting chapter working then please post the fix in your review because I wasted a good 3 hours on it before giving up. The problem is, is that there is no good documentation on the MSDN for using Activator.GetObject. In the web.config file, I'm still unsure if it should be ObjectUrl (in the book) or ObjectUri (every other article I've read).

Un livre de la sorte ne devrait pas exister. Juste à lire la couverture et l'endos du livre, nous sommes embalés par toute la capacité du livre, mais aussitôt qu'on se met à lire les chapitre on se demande: Où sont donc les éléments mentionnés sur la couverture. "Xml web services", hahaha, ... , 1 chapitre sur le sujet. Par chance que je ne m'hasardais pas sur le sujet. Un livre de 520 pages ? Ne vous fait pas avoir par l'arnaque; le livre contient 400 pages et le reste sont des "Appendix" sur quasiement toutes les lettres de l'alphabet. Le chapitre le plus gros porte sur les manipulations de données! He, je penses que j'en ai lu avec 70-306 assez pour dire que le titre du livre est Xml web services and server components Development et non la manipulation de données. Enfin, cela reste un opinion.

La raison de mon 1 étoile! Parce qu'il n'y avait pas 0 étoile lors de l'écriture de ce commentaire.

This was the second book I bought to study for the 70-310 exam. The test covered completely different material from this book. It did not help prepare me whatsoever for the exam, I am currently seeking a refund from the publisher.

By looking at the other reviews I can tell their looking for a book which gives them everything they need to pass the test. The book would have to be 3x as long to explain everything in the .NET Framework, etc. This touches all the topics. Although I don't agree with all the answers to the example questions, it is good enough to use for preparing for the test if you have actually used these technologies before you picked up the book.

I give it 3 stars because there is no Eratta available at the Osbourne website, etc. There are errors in the book, but I have never bought one where there were not.

I have tried to unzip the examples come with the CD but many of that not functioning especially for chapter 4, .Net Remoting and chapter 5 XML Web Services.
I have sent the error to the author but without any reply for months.

I cannot recommend this book to anyone involved in power supply design. I find that it is very poorly organized, and fails to explore many key topics in much depth. Life is too short to spend time wrestling with this type of reference. I would advise the interested reader to look for the power supply text written by Lenk or one of several other well-regarded texts.

It is a good reference book if you are involved of Power supplies.
I recomended it just for a book of reference.

I hate to give a bad review but this book really is so bad that I had to get rid of it and warn others about it. I can not imagine what the author was thinking when he wrote it. It just does not cover the topic well at all and any useful information in it is so poorly organized and written that it is mostly just a useless lump of paper. I think I gave my copy away but I should have thrown it in the trash. I am sorry I spent any of my money on it.

This book presents different circuit configurations and tries to explain what they do theoretically. Definitely not for beginners in electronics. It does not give you an introduction to many things you should know to be able to understand what is explained here. It is good as a reference book.

Book just skims the topics mentioned in its title - just a disordered collection of a bit outdated drawings with childlike commentary. No word about power conversion essentials: topologies, magnetics, feedback, stability, EMI, power semiconductors.

If you are a novice EE student, never buy this book. This is not an introduction in the sense we usually think. In a word, terrible!

This book is awful because it is very hard to read when you are first exposed to electrical engineering field. It's even worst when you are a freshman does not have the patience to peruse the book. Too much material, nothing interesting... basically you are just flipping V=IR around for the whole course (really boring.) It will discourage students studying electrical engineering as it did for me.

Fast forward, 7 years later when you have forgotten everything about EE or something like current flow through a diode; it's an excellent book to look up for that. The book is really really easy to read after you have taken other upper and graduate EE classes or design real circuits. It's a light easy book to read to refresh some FUNDAMENTAL concepts.... but then that is defeating the purpose of an "INTRODUCTION" book. Look at other books like Allan R. Hambley or arts of electronics (this is more pratical) as alternative books.

I used this book in my sophomore year Intro to EE class and it has to be the most horribly written technical textbook ever. I read from the book only once the whole semester and spent the rest of the time learning from tutors and lecture notes. The examples are cryptic and poorly explained and the chapters are haphazardly organized. I pity those who're forced to buy this for their EE classes, but if you have a choice, you can definitely find yourself a much better textbook than this piece of junk.

This book is to hard to follow, with bad examples and explaining things so you can't tell what is going on. I hate this book. My advice to you is if you are taking a class that is using this book, get another book to use because this book is worthless.

I'm a retired EE and having other textbooks in my library on this subject I would conclude that this is not an easy book to follow, certainly not as an introduction to second year engineering students. For example, the write up on higher-order circuits is just too superficial and left too large a gap to follow up into the examples or homework in my opinion. This treatment of subject areas seems to be the norm rather than the exception. This book is not incomplete and has many classical examples but it's just difficult to follow. There are better books. Its probably best to have other references in hand such as Schaum's, Charles M. Close, Ralph J. Smith, Johnson/Hilburn/Johnson and a good set of class notes to fill in between the gaps.

I agree with the previous reviewer.
It is hard to understand the the equations
if Dr.Bond don't give any explains or derivations.
How could he get lots of formula and paste them together
without any " derivations" ?

it's really a mess when i read this first 4 chapters.
the authors just put all the pieces of concepts together.
i suggest readers to buy another book from purdue's professor.

You can find in this book how to take advantage of ckt technique to achieve high speed and low power.

And, Chapter 3 & Chapter4 are most recommended!!

Good book for reference, but not for textbook. I recommend the author to re-edit the format of this book. It is hard to read it due to it's tight version. Also recommend author can have more examples and clear description for some acrons. Anyway, this is a good reference book to summary some important concepts, but fails to build up the circuit level skills for engineers. Unfortunately, I just can give it a "1 star". Sorry!

This book is better than some textbook because of its clear edition. But the concepts in this book seems like copied from other two textbooks.It is pity that we cannot get some new concepts from it.