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12 October 2001
Starting in Electronics
Van Valkenburgn, Nooger and Neville, Inc. Basic Solid State Electronics. Prompt Publications, An Imprint of Sams & Company, Indianapolis, IN. Revised edition 1992. $29.95 US.
ISBN 0-7906-1042-6.Reviewed by Sheldon Greaves
It is my considered opinion that the definitive introduction to hands-on electronics has yet to be written. I'm not talking about a primer aimed at someone who already knows a thing or two about physics. I'm talking about a guide for the total beginner, someone at the held-by-the-heels-and-newly-spanked level of understanding. A few books come close to this ideal. Forrest Mims' Getting Started in Electronics comes pretty close, as do a precious few others. There are plenty of beginnng electronics books out there, but the vast majority quickly forget that the reader is not an initiate into the world of electronics. Before you know it, the text is riddled with technical terms that the author fails to explain and concepts that the reader is expected to somehow divine from first principles. It is remarkable, for example, how many "beginning" electronics books will talk about resistors without bothering to tell the reader what roles they play in the function of a circuit.
Among those books that come close is this volume by Van Valkenburgh, et al. It is a very elementary introduction to the principles of electronics from a time when the vacuum tube still existed, albeit in declining numbers. The text of this book was taken from instructional materials developed by the US Navy for teaching electronics technicians. Therein lies part of this book's strength. Say what you will about the US military, when it comes to training they are the ultimate pragmatists; they stick with what works.
At 750+ pages, this book looks ponderous. However, the book focuses on basic concepts, then reviews them relentlessly. People who have a basic understanding of electronics will find this book tedious and perhaps even condescending. This book isn't for those people. Others, whose turn of mind do not grapple easily with the abstractions of electronics, will welcome this introduction.
Basic Solid State Electronics is well illustrated primarily with black and white line drawings that supplement the text nicely.
Most of the material is strongly biased towards applications in audio, radio and television. There is some material toward the end that introduces essentials of digital logic and digital systems. For instance, if you are interested in sensors and analog-to-digital-data acquision you won't find much here, although the information on amplifiers will probably be essential reading if you are really starting from scratch and eventually want to understand electronic data acquisition.
This book's biggest drawback is the lack of practical exercises. It does not explain the use of a breadboard for experimenting with circuits. (This is a common failing; a surprisingly large fraction of basic electronics books don't talk about using a breadboard, and the ones that do often fail to explain what a breadboard is or how to use one.) There are, however, a pretty good selection of study questions at the end of each chapter. These will go a long way towards helping the reader obtain a good theoretical grounding.
While not the perfect book for the neophyte electronics hobbyist, Basic Solid State Electronics can form an important part of the beginner's essential education.
