Cathleen Shamieh - Electronics For Dummies

Electronics For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015944208

ISBN 978-1-119-11797-1 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-11799-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-11798-8 (ebk)

1. Table of Contents

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, youve come to the right place!

Electronics For Dummies, 3rd Edition, is your entre 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 cant see electric current which youve been warned repeatedly not to touch. Thats enough to scare away most people. But as you continue to experience the daily benefits of electronics, you may begin to wonder how its 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 doesnt 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 youre looking for. Youll 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 youre finished with this book, you realize that electronics isnt 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:

• You dont know much if anything about electronics.
• You arent necessarily well versed in physics or mathematics, but youre at least moderately comfortable with introductory high school algebra.
• You want to find out how resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, and other electronic components actually work.
• You want to see for yourself in simple circuits you can build how each component does its job.
• Youre interested in building and understanding the operation of circuits that actually accomplish something useful.
• You have a pioneering spirit that is, a willingness to experiment, accept periodic setbacks, and tackle any problems that may crop up tempered by an interest in your personal safety.

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.