For the amount of marketing and praise this book has gotten, I’m very unimpressed. I don’t mean it to come across snobbish. I just don’t see a take that’s in any way out of the usual.

While I don’t expect one book to teach it all, I would like to see how it compares to the current crop of books and why is it better. The sample chapter left me very unimpressed and the book looks like it’s meant to be more for a coffee table and less for actual hands on usage. I don’t see a way that someone would put this into practice without an accompanying practice/lab book. Otherwise, it reads like trivia that showcases how much the author knows. Great, I guess?

Speaking of covers, Open Circuits: Inner Beauty of Electronics has a much more honest yet intelligent cover to it. Each page is both informational and extremely well done. Someone who has no knowledge of electronics or electricity can walk away learning something because it shows how things physically work with photos. The visual itself is almost self explanatory as a still image of different materials and how they are arranged. In other words, it has information density that’s both attractive and impactful.

My actual picks, are the likes of Floyd or Melvino, the Charles Platt one that has loads of circuits to build, and of course the clumsy but informative Forrest Mims series of books. Then you can get into Elicia White’s Embedded or any other assortment of more advanced books on power electronics etc.

Open to be proven wrong but yeah. I would have expected more because I don’t know of any book on this subject other than Art of Electronics and maybe Microelectronics by Sedra (or Razavi) that gets this much praise. Yet it started getting this praise before it was even released.

Bashing AI is fun except even good old Sam Ben-Yaakov is coming around to appreciate how useful it is to pedagogy.

I remain skeptical.