Ask HN: Best Layman's Book on Electricity

Seconded. For intuitive learners out there - it won't teach you a bunch of math but it will get you enough of a framework to start seeing landmarks and self-directing to relevant subjects for later deeper dives. Just having the vocabulary helps a ton, and this book provides it. It could be read in 2 or 3 dedicated sessions, and comes with all sorts of interesting circuits to build up to really kickstart that intuition.

I think in late high school, or maybe even after I started my electrical engineering degree, I bought a few of his books from Tandy (the Radio Shack brand here in Australia). They were a great way to get enthused about electronics and encouraged me to build and get hands-on (which is obviously what Tandy wanted to achieve)

Forrest M. Mims III is a treasure! http://www.forrestmims.com/

Art of Electronics and the accompanying lab manual are hands down the best electronics books I've read. Yes, definitely have the very fundamentals down - the equivalent of a day's reading on the fundamentals should be more than enough IMO.

Man, I've been looking for something as accessible and free for years. Thanks!

I've seen this site before, it looks really good but is there a downloadable/PDF version?

Thank your for introducing me to books by the US navy. A treasure trove!

I love that it’s just called “Basic Electricity”

Not electrical engineering, not electronics. Let us scare nobody off with the cover.

See also Chs. 1 & 2 of Applied Engineering Principles: https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Portals/103/Documents/NNPTC/Elec...

Also free from Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/navpers

A friend of mine recommended this to me many years ago. I love how concise and straightforward the material is. It doesn’t assume much of anything of the reader and will take you through it pretty methodically.

On the other hand, it is not a quick way to learn electronics, which is what I was interested in.

For that (and not the grid stuff) I’d recommend Charles Platt’s Make:Electronics. It’s great.

Extending from this, there’s also the NEETS reading material: https://www.hnsa.org/manuals-documents/2575-2/

It's funny to see the cover design degrade over time. The 1970 design is lovely

I can add to this as I've read parts of the 3rd edition.

First off, it's a one thousand page textbook so it's not a short read. However, the second chapter is just called "Theory" and it's about 200 pages long, and that single chapter is an excellent primer on electrical engineering.

Don't get the kindle version, it's too hard to read on Kindle.

Just found PEfI's 4th edition online and looked through it. It's beautifully laid out with clear illustrations, summary tables and well-explained text. I'm not usually tempted to buy a hardcopy but this looks super handy.

I would stay away from practical electronics for inventors. The book historically was chock full of really bad explanations and mistakes which brings into question the author’s knowledge and credentials. You don’t see that until you look at it from the professional side of things. To a new electronics person it looks credible. I can’t speak for later editions.

The Art of Electronics is an excellent book but misunderstood. It’s a reference book not an introductory text. It should be used in a professional capacity or be read alongside the accompanying student manual.

The book situation in this sector is pretty horrible unfortunately. The old NEETs stuff is verbose but teaches you nothing, the Make books teach you what but not how. Same with the Forest Mims books.

I have been considering writing a book which covers enough electronics for people to competently solve a problem they have without being led up the wrong path or delve too heavily into mathematics (the latter is unfortunately mostly unavoidable but basic algebra should be enough to solve nearly all problems)

> "The Art of Electronics", for example, I found to be absolutely abysmal.

Agreed. I had this damn thing collecting dust on my coffee table until someone expressed interest and took it off my hands.

I'll check out the PEfI book. I don't consider myself a total noob, but I'd also fail the first week's exam in any EE intro course.

I've got the third edition and I'm not very impressed with the adjective "practical" in the title.

It does not deal with practical topics like safety, system layout and grounding, board layout, reliability (heat, vibration, mechanical parts), connectors, testing, record-keeping, and so on. Some of these things get a superficial mention, to be sure. But not much practical advice.

For example there is a section of a few pages on transient [over]voltage suppressors, but it's just a catalog of a few different types of device with no real practical information on how to select and size them for different needs, test your design according to the standards, or the design tradeoffs.

I already know simplified treatments of the theory and I would have found a book on practical electronics to be useful.

I suggest the ARRL Handbook for Radio Amateurs.

Agreed. This is the first book that made stuff click for me and helped me enjoy electronics.

Thank you for this great recommendation. Read a sample of this and it's very readable. It also appears that the same author has written other books in the same vein. Do you recommend any of them?

Oh man, this is great. I was always confused with this stuff and didn't notice that this is such a big mess...

Thank you

I honestly wonder why such a book costs $150.

As a layperson, I would have thought that not dying from electric shock must be a pretty timeless body of knowledge. So I’d expect the cost of research, writing and publishing to have been spread out over many decades, in contrast to other literature. How come the book is so relatively expensive? Does electrical code change so often?