Instructors who are considering adopting the book can get a coupon for a free copy by emailing a request to karplus@soe.ucsc.edu. A solution set is also available to qualified instructors who adopt the text.

This textbook is for a first course on electronics. It assumes no prior electronics experience, but does assume that students have had calculus and high-school physics. Drafts of the book have been used for several years at UCSC. A key idea of the course is that students need a lot of design experience and hands-on work, rather than a lot of theory. The course is centered around the labs, which are a mix of design labs and measurement/modeling labs.

The book is also intended for people to be able to learn from without a course, and many of the recent changes are to make the book more useful to hobbyists and students on a limited budget, by changing the labs so that they can be done without expensive lab equipment. The equipment needed is described in the Preface, which is included in the free sample chapters.

My blog https://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com discusses the development of the course and the book, along with many other topics. Schedules for past offerings of the course can be found at https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus/bme51

The book is now complete, as Edition 1.2. There may be future editions.

Buying the book now gets you all future updates published through Leanpub.

673 pages

342 figures

14 tables

523 index entries

162 references

The chapter on design report guidelines is available free as a separate publication:

https://leanpub.com/design_report_guidelines

As before, I am still offering 25¢ rewards for the first report of each error (no matter how small) in the book. I caught a number of typos and tandem duplicate words this time, and fixed some punctuation problems, but I probably introduced some new ones.

I have started recording video lectures for the book. Playlists are at

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQCrrTKnAE-97LcrJuUQ_5wKBFil8An9i

for the first course and

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQCrrTKnAE--khjVV52ZWU_Usc3e6KV9J

for the second course (The second course is done, since I taught it in Fall 2020, but the first course is only about 80% done, as I am teaching it in Winter 2021.)