Do I need to buy The Art of Electronics and what about parts kits?
A reader asked:
I have 2 questions about the book. I was looking on the LAoE website and it said that it’s a companion book to the book “The art of electronics”. Does this mean that I need to get both books? I have the LAoE already but not the “The art of electronics”. Since I don’t have a background in electronics I just want to make sure that I’m getting everything. My second question is about the parts list. I’ve noticed that its quite extensive and it requires getting parts from multiple websites and vendors, what I’d like to know is would a electronics kit with different electronic parts be acceptable or do I need to get the exact parts listed in the parts list?
My reply:
You do not have to buy The Art of Electronics, nor should you as a beginner. AoE is a reference compendium of electronic devices and circuits while LAoE is a set of labs to try those circuits and devices out. But LAoE is complete itself; it explains the devices and circuits it uses so you do not need any additional texts. Once you are familiar with the contents of LAoE you might consider AoE if you want more depth or more complexity. We have included notations in LAoE to particular sections of AoE for people who have both or want more information but you can just ignore those.
We have tried to get as many parts as possible from a single source (Digikey) but some items either were out of stock when we made up the parts list (you might want to check again when you put together an order) or are only available elsewhere (the FPGA for example). Electronics kits for the capacitors and resistors should work fine (although most resistor kits don’t include parts over 1M Ohm – check to be sure since a few labs use a 10M resistor) and general kits may include op amps and transistors that can be substituted but we haven’t tested them and as a beginner it may be difficult to tell if something is similar enough to work.
On the other hand, you don’t have to do every experiment/lab in the book or at least not all at once. For example, you might want to do the digital chapters 14 through 19 first so you only need those parts to start (and with only a few exceptions the parts in the digital parts list all are available from Digikey). I taught the second half of the book remotely during COVID and had to send parts kits to my students and it was not an unreasonable number of items. Many of the oddball parts are only used in one or two labs so you can skip those if you don’t have the part (see High Cost Parts).