I recently purchased this book, along with three different kits that supplied all the tools and components I would need to carry out the experiments for roughly the first two thirds of the book (total cost: around 300 dollars, I know I could have gotten most of this stuff cheaper but such is life). My experience was...mixed. The book did a great job explaining some of the basic principles of electronics but these kind of cookbook tutorials don't seem to work as well as say a book that will teach you everything you need to know about Ruby programming. Eventually you will need to start from hard theoretic principles in order to design your own circuits.

I've come to the realization that you need to pull from a bunch of different sources to get a good enough background in the domain of electrons to start building a project you want to see realized, and that mastery in this domain is probably a journey that can be measured in decades.

I highly recommend this book. The first practical lesson, as I recall, has you short-circuit a battery and destroy an LED. It's great to learn the limits of typical components this way, and it takes away the fear of breaking stuff. It's written simple enough to be followed by a child, but I had a blast going through it as a physics grad student who knew electrodynamics and very little electronics.

The first two editions had quite a few errata, but there is an online page for them:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9780596153748...

I've been following this course (to refresh my informal knowledge of electronics, which I haven't touched since I discovered it was way cheaper to write broken code than build a broken circuit back in my teens) and it's pretty good. I like how they mix the theory with practical experiments showing it in practice.

I don't recommend the Kindle version though, the formatting is really lacking.

Thanks for the recommendation. I just purchased the Kindle version. I'm not really an electronics guy, but have always been interested in how it works. Will do by best to put this book to use!