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See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Electronics#Third_e... for all the pre-announcements since 2006. This isn't the first announcement. Back in 2009 or so Amazon was taking pre-orders.

It really is an excellent book. It was written as a guide for grad students who need to build instrumentation. A 25 year old book on electronic design that talks about specific IC part numbers in detail is way out of date, though. The approach used needs a refresh every five years or so.

It's less necessary than it used to be. We have so many on-line resources for building electronics now.

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Interestingly, a lot of the parts discussed are still in wide use today. Much of the concepts are necessary for understanding circuits and how they work.

Some of the parts discussed are probably in wide use because they are mentioned in AoE. The uA741 effect.

That was basically the only opamp we were allowed to use in my undergraduate electronics for Physicists classes.

It's a terrible opamp for precision measurement. (Actually it's a terrible opamp for most things, except maybe student experiments.)

I have mixed feelings about AofA.

On the one hand it's funny and a good broad introduction to a lot of relevant concepts.

On the other it glosses over so much of the math you need to learn to be competent at design that it doesn't teach you nearly as much as it seems to.

When I first read it as an electronic engineering undergrad I thought this was a very good thing, especially compared to the standard textbooks that buried you in equations.

A few decades later I'm not so convinced. I think a good upgrade would be a series of much bigger books (or Wiki pages?) that keep the breezy hands-on style but also dig fearlessly into the details.

But it's an intro book. No single text can cover the introduction for the range com people with no background to people designing cutting edge circuitry. At some point you need a BS or MS in EE of course, but at this point you're out of the realm of AoE.

I heard one guy who I used to work with criticize AoE for having an 'incorrect' circuit (I think it was some kind of differential amp). It turns out that this guy had a MS in EE, and was designing a low-noise amplifier to work in GHz range and complaining that the AoE circuit diagram, which was only meant probably up to a few MHz tops, didn't account for some source of thermodynamic noise from the silicon transistors. Or something like that, long ago. Point is, if you're at that level of expertise you should not be using an intro book. The fact this guy even thought to use AoE speaks volumes of just how useful it really is.

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