Book recommendation -- electronics and PCB design for beginners?

[ebastler]

An electronics beginner has asked me for a book recommendation. She would like to learn basic electronics, and basic PCB design and simulation at the same time -- the latter ideally using KiCad, but other (preferably free) tools would also work.

So we are looking for a primer in electronics -- starting with a blinking LED or such, working its way up to 74xx digital logic and microcontrollers, for example. Ideally it would show capturing schematics in a PCB CAD program, and converting them into layouts, in parallel with the fundamentals; alternatively that could be a separate course. (The official KiCad tutorial is not bad for the second part.)

Has anyone come across an electronics primer they really like? Book or online (HTML) would be fine; maybe even a video series could work.

Thanks for your suggestions!

[liaifat85]

You can suggest her Art of Electronics by  Paul Horowitz. Here are some more suggestions:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedCircuitBoard/comments/5yerqp/what_books_would_you_recommend_for_learning_pcb/

[ebastler]

Thanks! The Art of Electronics was my first (and so far only) suggestion -- it was a revelation for me when I discovered the 2nd edition during a US visit in 1990, and it is still my go-to reference today. But she found it a bit overwhelming, so something simpler and more limited would be good for starters.

I will take a look at the reddit list, thank you!

[retiredfeline]

Is her name Lisa who recently posted on the KiCad forum?  There I suggest playing with Falstad, or the Lushprojects port to HTML5. There are a handful of sample circuits that are provided on the two sites. It's far easier to use for simple circuits than tackling ngspice. Even experienced KiCad users get tied up in knots by the ngspice details.

Designing PCBs can be a separate course. Really why would you make a PCB for a battery, resistor and LED? 

[Solder_Junkie]

That book is hugely expensive! There are some really excellent YouTube videos by Alan Wolke. Look up W2AEW on Y/T. He has tutorials on subjects ranging from op amps, biasing a transistor, to using an oscilloscope. Alan is an engineer with Tektronix and has superb presentation skills.

While free, very popular, and very comprehensive, KiCad has a steep learning curve and is not easy for a beginner to learn PCB layout with.

My own favourite PCB software is not free, costing around 49 euros. There are demo and view only versions too. See:
https://www.electronic-software-shop.com/lng/en/electronic-software/sprint-layout-60.html

Sprint Layout is much simpler to use than KiCad.

There are free circuit simulation programs around. One of the popular ones is LTSpice, intended to assist designers with products by Analog Devices:
https://www.analog.com/en/design-center/design-tools-and-calculators/ltspice-simulator.html

A simpler to use Spice modelling program is Tina, which is aimed at the education and industrial training market. It is not free, the student version costs 49 euros. Although Texas Instruments offer a free version to help design circuits with their components:

https://www.ti.com/tool/TINA-TI
https://www.tina.com/

I use both LTSpice and Tina, it helps avoid mistakes as you can play around with circuits to your hearts content without damage to any components… even easier than using a bread board.

Sorry, can’t really help with books. I was a full time student and spent most of my working life dealing with electronics of one sort or another for a major international manufacturer who provided their own training.

SJ

[ebastler]

That book is hugely expensive! There are some really excellent YouTube videos by Alan Wolke. Look up W2AEW on Y/T. He has tutorials on subjects ranging from op amps, biasing a transistor, to using an oscilloscope. Alan is an engineer with Tektronix and has superb presentation skills.

The Art of Electronics is not cheap, but not hugely expensive either. Look at the technical and scientific books from Springer, for example -- mostly in the 3-digit price range, for much slimmer books. Anyway, AoE is absolutely worth its price to me, but not the right beginner book in the present case.

Thanks for the W2AEW recommendation -- I will take a look!

Sprint Layout is much simpler to use than KiCad.

KiCad is indeed a mouthful, and I do have some concerns about recommending it as a first PCB CAD program. But I would not want to start with a pure "layout painting" program; the workflow should start with schematic capture. Unless for very simple designs, it's just too easy (at least for me...) to get stuff wrong without the built-in consistency check against the schematic. And having a clean and exact schematic has been useful to me so many times during debugging or when I pick up a project again later.

[tooki]

An electronics beginner has asked me for a book recommendation. She would like to learn basic electronics, and basic PCB design and simulation at the same time -- the latter ideally using KiCad, but other (preferably free) tools would also work.

So we are looking for a primer in electronics -- starting with a blinking LED or such, working its way up to 74xx digital logic and microcontrollers, for example. Ideally it would show capturing schematics in a PCB CAD program, and converting them into layouts, in parallel with the fundamentals; alternatively that could be a separate course. (The official KiCad tutorial is not bad for the second part.)

Has anyone come across an electronics primer they really like? Book or online (HTML) would be fine; maybe even a video series could work.

Thanks for your suggestions!

Is this person a German speaker?

If so, I honestly have found the books in German to be superior overall.

For self-paced learning, I highly recommend the books from Vogel-Fachbuch titled Elektronik 1-7. I haven’t used #5-7, but I found 1-4 to be consistently excellent at explaining things well. The same publisher has a few other books, including one called “Elementare Elektronik” which looks like it may be a summary. They also have a book “Leiterplatten-Prototyping” that looks like it might cover your other topic.

I also really like the books published by Europa-Lehrmittel. Something I really like about most of their books is that they include both the German and English terminology for things, which is extremely helpful for a German speaker reading a datasheet, for example. (I just bought myself a copy of their “Taschenbuch der Elektrotechnik”. Though it’s not what I’d recommend for a beginner, since that’s a condensed reference book, not one that explains step by step in detail.)

Another book I looked at recently and liked was “Elektrotechnik zum Selbststudium” from Springer Vieweg. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had other relevant books, but Springer’s website is awful, with no practical way I could find to drill down through the thousands of books they have…


In English: I have the Art of Electronics and while it’s excellent at some topics, it completely ignores others that I think are quite important. I was surprisingly impressed by the free “Lessons in Electric Circuits” by Tony Kuphaldt. I wish he’d kept writing more chapters because it’s excellent. I recommend using the version available at https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/ (rather than the one on Kuphaldt’s website) because the author wrote the entire book using electron current flow, i.e. exactly backwards to 99% of everything else. Allaboutcircuits.com rewrote it to use conventional current, which makes far more sense IMHO.

[ebastler]

In the present case, English is preferred. But thank you for the suggestions, tooki!

Frankly I would not even have looked into German books, since my experience (from a few decades back though) is that U.S. books struck a better balance between theory and practical information. It used to be the case that self-respecting German academics did not both with practicalities, at least not in public.   After being solidly put off by Tietze-Schenk, the AoE book by Horowitz-Hill really was a revelation for me. But a lot of time has passed and things might very well have changed for the better. I will take a closer look at the German titles you suggested to get a more current perspective.

Surprising coincidence: “Lessons in Electric Circuits” by Tony Kuphaldt is what we just settled on as a beginner curriculum! I quite like the structure, and especially the practical hints on how to set up a beginner lab, handle measurement instruments etc. in Vol. IV. Thank you for another recommendation and validation of that course!

The "Leiterplatten-Prototyping" book looks interesting; I am sure I can learn a few things from that one! Edited by LPKF though, so it might be a bit biased towards their rapid prototyping technologies?

[tooki]

Ok, in fairness, I was thinking of theory more than “practical” advice. I guess maybe at some point, once you understand the theory well enough, the distinction starts to blur. With that said, the book I just got contains quite a bit of practical stuff, so maybe one of Europa-Lehrmittel’s books would do well in that regard.

I have only an ancient Tietze-Schenk I found at work, I need to look at what a recent edition looks like! :p

As I said with Kuphaldt, I just strongly recommend using the edited version I linked to. I cannot wrap my head around why he used electron current in the original…

As for the PCB book, I don’t have access to a copy, but the table of contents looks like it’s a good overview of PCB technology.

[BillyO]

Electronic Principles by A. P. Malvino is an excellent text too.   Possibly better than the Art of Electronics as it is more to the point and much better laid out.

It can be expensive too, if you want the latest edition, but used older editions can be had for very reasonable prices.  The fundamentals don't change much.

It should be pointed out that both of these texts assume the reader has some of the basics already in hand like resistors, capacitors and inductors, series and parallel circuits and basic AC circuit behavior as neither text goes into these in much detail.  If the student needs these as well a solid basic electronics text might be a good companion.  Grob Basic Electronics does this stuff in agonizing detail but it is a popular text for introductory high school electronics.

[MarkF]

As to your last part, have you seen Dave's "PCB Design Tutorial".