Electronics > Beginners
[ERRORS & MISTAKES] Practical Electronics For Inventors 4th ed
Mozee:
Honestly I finished reading Buchla and Floyd’s book Electronics Fundamentals which was very very useful and easy to understand. There were many things that were not that clear to me and some which i had no interest in (for now) such as Digital electronics. I wanted to read another book to support and reinforce what I learned and I came across this book!
Are you sure those books can be better than this one in doing so?
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bd139:
100% sure. It has a publication history spanning 38 years and 3 editions so far, all of which I have bought and used extensively.
Perhaps against the grain but I recommend that you find a full PDF (hint: look on Library Genesis) and review the material on any book before you buy it. The first chapter of Art of Electronics is worth reading and working through end to end as a decider before buying.
See the chapter 9 PDF I linked above - it has a full table of contents in it as well to see what you're getting. There's not crap like the Monk book which goes on some random diversion of how to build an electronics workbench as well.
If I remember correctly, Electronics Fundamentals was the Pearson one I saw a few years ago. The printing was so bad you couldn't work out what the resistor colours were :palm:
Quick edit: here's something I actually just threw together a couple of weeks back straight from the book:
Works perfectly after faffing around trying to get something relatively stable I designed myself and tried various canned designs off the internet. That's what it's full of. Stuff that works!
spec:
Hi Mozee
Practical Electronics for Inventors is a very good book that manages to explain some quite complex aspects of electronics in simple and direct terms without too much math either. Of course, a professional engineer would find it a touch elementary but that is true of any introductory book in any field.
I am afraid that errors are endemic in books, especially technical books, so don't let that put you off this book. As for reporting the errors to the publishers or authors, you may as well pee into the wind. In general, there is no mechanism for correcting errors. Sure you can report an error to the author/publisher and you will possibly get a nice reply thanking you and saying what a valuable customer you are- computers are very polite. Some authors/publishes even have erratas on their sites which you would think would be the answer, but this is just a facade in most cases.
But as to getting corrections embodied- forget it. One of the main reasons is the cost and logistics. Just imagine what it would cost to update and republish a book! So you just have to live with errors and not just errors in books; the net is full of errors and misinformation.
About errors. The gross (macro) errors are easy to spot and good fun: 'the collector current of the BC546 will be 70A' But it is the little errors (micro) that are often hard to detect and cause the most problems: 'The HFE of a BC546 transistor is Ib/Ie' Some of the worst are in math and programming books, where it is not always easy to spot a mistake, which is subtle. Herbert Schildt, one of the best authors on software, is famous for errors- his books are splattered with them.
Recently, I was doing C# on the the latest Windows Visual Studio and had an excellent book on the subject. But the very first code sample had a line missing which meant that it would not run. That took me half a day to sort out.
There is a tendency to assume that anything that is in print or on the net has a certain authority and must be true, but this is a fallacy. And when you get to the media, you can pretty much assume that the information is untrue, hearsay, speculation, or opinion being stated as fact.
Nearly all of my many books are in electronic form, and I regularly edit them to correct errors.
bd139:
Yes and no.
A properly edited book like TAOE gets reprinted with errata regularly and errata is published.
Practical Electronics for Inventors has had the same errors in it since 2nd edition, published 12 years ago. 2 editions later they haven't ironed any bugs out yet. And there is no errata! That's just crap and doesn't deserve any attention at this point.
If you don't complain to the publishers and the authors then the books never get improved and we drown in an ocean of crap. We have the best opportunity now to get rid of all the bad books as public review is possible. Unfortunately the issue is now that most of the reviewers couldn't spot a turd if it was in the middle of the sandwich they were eating.
nockieboy:
--- Quote from: bd139 on December 17, 2018, 09:52:00 am ---If you don't complain to the publishers and the authors then the books never get improved and we drown in an ocean of crap. We have the best opportunity now to get rid of all the bad books as public review is possible. Unfortunately the issue is now that most of the reviewers couldn't spot a turd if it was in the middle of the sandwich they were eating.
--- End quote ---
Sorry, I'm not adding much to this conversation but I have to point out that you made me laugh out loud at the turd-spotting comment! :-DD
I must agree with your general point, though - as seemingly useless as it may seem pointing these errors out to the publishers etc, if no-one does it then we'll just end up wallowing in an ocean of wrong information. Perhaps if you get no joy via the publishers, the best way to 'feedback' errors is to write public reviews pointing out all the problems - authors and publishers alike don't appreciate bad press and I'm sure will do what they can to correct errors if it's affecting their sales?
Thanks for the laugh. :-+
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