That's one serious weakness of the 3rd edition, I agree, but it's the only part I think is clearly inferior to the 2nd. The actual electronics content was updated and expanded significantly without omitting anything too important.

What little the 3rd ed. does say about construction techniques isn't particularly helpful (or even true), such as when they exaggerate the challenges of working with SMT parts on page 65. It was probably better that they didn't try to go any deeper.