It is difficult to imagine late-night bedtime reading of a 1,192 page, 2.3 kg book. Yet this is what I found myself doing when I got my hands on the third edition of this Horowitz and Hill classic. Although I’m a proud and happy owner of the book’s 1989 second edition, there is so much new and interesting material in the third one that I couldn’t put it down.
The book’s topic is the design of real-world electronic circuits. From the analog world, it covers the use of passive components, bipolar and field-effect transistors, and operational amplifiers. It then presents the implementation of precision, filter, oscillator, timer, low-noise, voltage regulation, and power conversion circuits. The book’s final chapters move into the digital realm where they discuss the basics of digital design, programmable logic devices, logic and analog interfacing, computers, and microcontrollers. I found the chapter on computers not as strong as the rest (for example, the universal serial bus (USB) interface is covered in less than a page), but treating the topic as extensively as the rest of the book’s material could have easily doubled its size. A number of appendices cover in a extremely readable fashion mathematical concepts, schematic diagrams, resistor types, Thévenin’s theorem, Butterworth filters, load lines, transmission lines, SPICE, oscilloscopes, and much more.
It’s obvious that the authors enjoy sharing through their writings their experience, their practical no-nonsense knowledge, and their love of exploring electronic circuits and tinkering with them. They achieve this superbly. Some sections, such as a description of the seemingly impossible design of a part-per-million-accurate, low-noise, high-input impedance digital multimeter, read like a nail-biting thriller story. The text is complemented with very readable circuit diagrams, numerous performance plots, comprehensive component selection tables, and mercifully few equations. Most circuits are based on real components rather than idealized ones, and the authors often discuss at length the advantages and quirks of particular choices.
As one might expect for a book dealing with a rapidly advancing field, many parts of the text have been updated to reflect a quarter-century of progress in electronic devices. Although the number of pages of the third edition has remained roughly similar to the second one, the book uses wider pages and a smaller font to cram in a lot more material. This spans topics ranging from quartz crystal oscillators and logic family properties to optoelectronics and delta-sigma converters. I especially enjoyed reading the new “Design by the Masters” sections where the authors reverse-engineer the workings of real-world exemplar circuits. Reassuringly, classic components, such as the 555 oscillator and the 78xx voltage regulators, continue to have the place they deserve.
Despite its shamelessly practical bend, the book is anything but an oversimplified cookbook. Horowitz and Hill outline alternative designs, explain the role of each component in a circuit, and analyze their choices of component values based on the underlying theory, equations, and tolerances. This makes the book suitable both as a textbook and as a reference for professional and hobbyist electronics designers. The authors deserve applause for their sustained painstaking work and the wonderful result.
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