Are you curious to know what makes your iPhone tick? How about your tablet, stereo system, GPS device, HDTV — well, just about every other electronic thing you use to entertain yourself and enrich your life?
Or have you wondered how resistors, diodes, transistors, capacitors, and other building blocks of electronics work? Been tempted to try building your own electronic devices? Well, you’ve come to the right place!
Electronics For Dummies, 3rd Edition, is your entrée into the exciting world of modern electronics. Loaded with illustrations and plain-English explanations, this book enables you to understand, create, and troubleshoot your own electronic devices.
All too often, electronics seems like a mystery because it involves controlling something you can’t see — electric current — which you’ve been warned repeatedly not to touch. That’s enough to scare away most people. But as you continue to experience the daily benefits of electronics, you may begin to wonder how it’s possible to make so many incredible things happen in such small spaces.
This book offers you a chance to satisfy your curiosity about electronics while having a lot of fun along the way. You get a basic understanding of exactly what electronics is, down-to-earth explanations (and gobs of illustrations) of how major electronic components — and the rules that govern them — work, and step-by-step instructions for building and testing working electronic circuits and projects. Although this book doesn’t pretend to answer all your questions about electronics, it gives you a good grounding in the essentials and prepares you to dig deeper into the world of electronic circuits.
I assume that you may want to jump around this book a bit, diving deep into a topic that holds special interest for you and possibly skimming through other topics. For this reason, I provide loads of chapter cross-references to point you to information that can fill in any gaps or refresh your memory on a topic.
The table of contents at the front of this book provides an excellent resource that you can use to quickly locate exactly what you’re looking for. You’ll also find the glossary useful when you get stuck on a particular term and need to review its definition. Finally, the folks at Wiley have thoughtfully provided a thorough index at the back of the book to assist you in narrowing your reading to specific pages.
It is my hope that when you’re finished with this book, you realize that electronics isn’t as complicated as you may have once thought. And, it is my intent to arm you with the knowledge and confidence you need to charge ahead in the exciting field of electronics.
In writing this book, I made a few assumptions about the skill level and interests of you and other readers when it comes to the field of electronics. I tailored the book based on the following assumptions:
I start from scratch — explaining what electric current is and why circuits are necessary for current to flow — and build from there. You find easy-to-understand descriptions of how each electronic component works supported by lots of illustrative photographs and diagrams. In 9 of the first 11 chapters, you find one or more mini projects you can build in 15 minutes or so; each is designed to showcase how a particular component works.
Later in the book, I provide several fun projects you can build in an hour or less, and I explain the workings of each one in detail. By building these projects, you get to see firsthand how various components work together to make something cool — sometimes even useful — happen.
As you embark on this electronics tour, expect to make some mistakes along the way. Mistakes are fine; they help enhance your understanding of and appreciation for electronics. Keep in mind: no pain, no gain. (Or should I say, no transistor, no gain?)
I have written a lot of extra content that you won’t find in this book. Go online to find the following:
www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/electronics
): Here you’ll find important formulas and other information you may want to refer to quickly and easily when you’re working with a circuit.www.dummies.com/extras/electronics
): Discover how semiconductors conduct, find out what an oscilloscope is and how it is used, and get more information designed to enhance your knowledge and use of electronics.www.dummies.com/extras/electronics
): Go to this link to find any significate updates or corrections to the material in this book. (My editor made me add the part about corrections, but since I dun’t maek mistacks, they’re wont be any errata posted. By the weigh, do you want too by a bridge?)You can use this book in a number of ways. If you start at the beginning (a good place to start), you discover the basics of electronics, add to your knowledge one component at a time, and then put it all together by building projects in your fully outfitted electronics lab.
Or, if you’ve always been curious about, say, how transistors work, you can jump right into Chapter 10, find out about those amazing little three-legged components, and build a couple of transistor circuits. With a chapter each focused on resistors, capacitors, inductors, diodes, transistors, and integrated circuits (ICs), you can direct your energy to a single chapter to master the component of your choice.
This book also serves as a useful reference, so when you start creating your own circuits, you can go back into the book to refresh your memory on a particular component or rule that governs circuits.
Here are my recommendations for good places to start in this book:
I hope you thoroughly enjoy the journey you are about to begin. Now, go forth, and explore!
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