The Art of Electronics (book)

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The Art of Electronics, by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill, is a popular textbook dealing with analog and digital electronics. It is sometimes referred to as the "electronics bible", and remains a popular text, although its most recent (2nd) edition was released in 1989.

The text is information-dense, but with an informal, light tone that makes it more accessible. At over 1000 pages (second edition) it covers virtually all areas of electronics design, from basic DC voltage, current, and resistance, to active filters and oscillators, to digital electronics, including microprocessors and digital bus interfacing. It also includes discussions of such often-neglected areas as high-frequency, high-speed design techniques and low-power applications.

The book is particularly useful because of its many example circuits. In addition to having examples of good circuits it also has examples of bad ideas, with excellent discussions of what makes the good designs good and the bad ones bad. It is a cross between a textbook and reference manual, though without the chapter-end questions and exercises that are often found in textbooks.

There is also a complementary text, "The Student Manual for The Art of Electronics" by Thomas C. Hayes and Paul Horowitz. The Student Manual, while referencing the main text extensively, is designed to help people learning electronics, while The Art of Electronics itself is more a reference work for electronics practitioners. The student manual thus contains material such as lab exercises and explanatory text supplements aimed at students or other people learning electronics, while The Art of Electronics contains the tables, equations, diagrams, and other material that practitioners will want to use for reference.