Make: Electronics

If you're just getting started this is a perfect starting point. It gives you everything you need. It is simple and as I moved on to more complicated things I quickly needed more material but I would not have reached this point without this book. I'm glad I came across this and still keep it with me.

Excellent book. I took electronics in high school but wanted a refresher - and overall wish I'd listened better. :-) Platt's approach and writing style are excellent. There are a couple mistakes in the book so it is worthwhile to check out the Errata on the O'Reilly web page for the book. My only criticism is that Experiment 17 (Intrusion Alarm), while good practice and theory, is actually quite a lot of effort for a very underwhelming result. It's left to the reader to integrate a tone circuit - on a separate breadboard. You can use something like the single 555 tone in experiment 16 or a transistor version such as experiment 11. The information is all in the book to do this, but there's a bit of a handwave on this in experiment 17. ("Add audio output here") And even having done that, you are totally on your own for sensors or stand-ins for the sensors. The kits for the book don't include any reed sensors. And if you purchased the parts kits, you only have one 555 beyond the three needed for exp 17 and just a single breadboard. Additionally, to see this project all the way through, you need at least a stripboard style perf board - again, not included in the kits. (I realize the author doesn't create the kits, but he mentions that these optional parts won't be included so it wasn't an unknown.) I mean, you don't HAVE to solder it. And you can use push buttons to stand in for sensors, and you can figure out the audio alarm part, possibly using the lower part of the perf board...but this project stands out as sort of the least complete and ready to go end-to-end project in the book. To be honest, even if he'd said "I'm leaving out a few details that you should be able to figure out at this point" (which is true) would make it "fit" more in the spirit of the book. To be fair to this project, I do appreciate the sort of conversational "working it out" process that we see, as if we are just in the room with Platt as he works through it. That's great stuff.

I'm new to hobby electronics and this book is great for beginners. Very easy to understand. Each chapter explains how each electronic component works and then has an experiment to actually see how it works. It shows you how to build each circuit using an easy to understand wiring illustration along with a schematic so you learn how to read and understand schematics. The book also has a list of what you need for each experiment along with a list of suppliers to purchase your components from. This book reminds me of a text book you may see in a basic electronics lab course in school.

For many years I have been interested in learning electronics, and I have purchased what feels like over a dozen different books, kits or online courses. The material in nearly all of them were written by engineers and it felt like for engineers. Just could not get into them. Additionally, many of the other kits and courses force your to learn Arduios, which I am not against at a future date, but for right now, I want to understand the basics of schematics and working with breadboards. I want to learn the components, what they do and how to plan to use them. I want instruction using a basic multi-meter. Happy to learn about Arduino's later. Just not what I am still wrapping my mind around the basics. Determined, I decided to just start buying all of the beginner books out there until I found an instructor whose style resonated with me. THIS IS THE BOOK! Just WOW! Such clarity and simplicity to understand. Charles Platt clearly understands how to take a complex subject matter and make it palpable for a beginner like me. That is also not to say his understanding is surface level, he has a very DEEP understanding of electronics and has many additional books on the subject. Suffice it to say, I study his book EVERY MORNING now and am LOVING it. There are some things I need to re-read, but I definitely am having much more success with Make:Electronics 3rd Edition. (Always get the latest editions!) Also, there is an electronics component kit that comes with this book. I highly, HIGHLY recommend getting this kit as well, so you can physically create the breadboards and learn hands on as you go. You will be at a huge learning disadvantage if you do not do these experiments. Thank you Charles Platt! As a teacher myself, I appreciate the effort you have taken to make this difficult subject matter so accessible- I appreciate you!

Excellent book easy to read and learn great photos and examples well documented and written look forward to his next book

This has been a great way to get into electronics for me. I have pretty close to 0 background and so I wanted to start from the absolute beginning, and this book has been excellent for that. BUT, a word of caution. I will say that if you want to follow along exactly with this book, you should get the book first, and then buy one of the two kits from different companies that has the specific parts the author is talking about. They are listed in the back of the book. I purchased a kit before this book that has probably 70% of the parts he uses, but some resistors are rated slightly differently than what he uses for instance, and if you truly are starting from the beginning like I was, then all of the sudden I'm trying not only to learn what the author is saying, but also worrying about whether or not something will work because I have the wrong part or if it's because I did something wrong. That being said, at the end of the book there is an appendix so you can buy individual parts which is what I'm looking at, but in hindsight, even though the kits aren't cheap, it would have been so much easier and probably not much more expensive to just buy the kits pre-made. So, in summation, I recommend the book, but I wish I would have also bought the kit the author recommends. If you don't have that kit, you won't be able to dive right in and it'll take some extra research and extra time to get the parts to really get into the book and follow along exactly.

Great resource for beginners and old-timers alike.

If you’re looking for an exception book on learning electronics then look no further. As a hobbyist that enjoys making circuits, I can tell you that not only were they fun to build but explains the theory of operation without complicating how it works. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to understand basic electronics and much more.