Last update: 6/4/97
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My textbook, Principals of Electronics, Analog and Digital is specifically designed to meet the needs of an introductory course in electronics for majors in physics, the natural sciences, and engineering. It was published in 1987 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich who acquired the book from their Academic Press division while it was in production. For the last few years this text has been available from their Saunders College Publishing division, but it is now being distributed by Oxford University Press and listed in their OUP-USA General Catalog under Computer Sciences and Engineering and Technology. Whatever the listing and even though the subject is a technical one, this is a physics text with the associated attention to the fundamental elements and concepts. It presumes little prior knowledge on the part of the student, other than a certain facility with mathematics and problem solving.
The first eight chapters of this text cover electronics from DC passive circuits through operational amplifiers. The underlying theme in the analog section is to establish approximate methods by which a circuit's complex transfer function in the frequency domain can be used to estimate the circuit's impulse or transient response. Digital circuits are introduced in Chapter 9, and Chapter 10 combines analog and digital. The computer section of Chapter 11 is now somewhat out of date but this chapter also has some useful material on analog signal transmission. Chapter 12 develops general signal analysis techniques, Chapter 13 discusses Noise and Statistics, and Chapter 14 introduces Discrete Signal Analysis.
My introductory course at Duke stops with Chapter 9. For several years I also taught an advanced course that briefly reviewed Chapters 8 and 9, then finished the book. The laboratory portion of the advanced course consisted of a few general labs and a project involving data acquisition using a computer. These days I'd recommend using a Mac or PC with a National Instruments ADC capable board and LabView.
An eleven page Acrobat (pdf) [see note] formatted version of the Table of Contents is now available. The chapter titles and sizes (including problems) are:
In the confusion of changing divisions, the initial printing was way too large with the result that we are still in the first printing, and I have been unable to correct the many errors that found their way into the pictures, formulas, and text. However, over five hundred students have used the book in my courses here at Duke so I've been able to develop a four page errata of the more important errors. I can't display it here because of the symbols, subscripts, and such, but you can download the errata in Acrobat (pdf) [see note] format.
Laboratory
exercises covering essentially the first ten chapters are now available
in postscript and pdf formats.
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