About Book:

      This book evolved from a set of notes written to accompany a one-semester course in laboratory electronics at Harvard. That course has a varied enrollment –undergraduates picking up skills for their eventual work in science of industry, graduate students with a field of research clearly in mind, and advanced graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who suddenly find themselves hampered by their inability to “do electronics.”

       It soon became clear that existing textbooks were inadequate for such a course. Although there are excellent treatments of each electronics specialty, written for the planned sequence of a four-year engineering curriculum or for the practicing engineer, those books that attempt to address the whole field of electronics seem to suffer from excessive detail (the handbook syndrome),from oversimplification (the cookbook syndrome), or from poor balance of material. Much of the favorite pedagogy of beginning textbooks is quite unnecessary and, in fact, is not used by practicing engineers, while useful circuitry and methods of analysis in daily use by circuit designers lie hidden in application notes, engineering journals, and hard-to-get data books. In other words, there is a tendency among textbook writers to represent the theory, rather that the art, of electronics.