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I am working through The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill. I am finding it quite a challenge but taking my time and making sure I understand everything in each section before I go on to the next.

I'm wondering, how much of a standard EE course of study is this book? As in, if a university used this book, would it cover a week, month, semester, entire year, etc.

Put differently, how much of what a graduating electrical engineer should know can be found within?

Null
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nuggethead
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    A great book, but it is difficult to compare it with an EE education. The book is heavy on practical applications and light on math and theory. An EE education is heavy on math and theory and light on practical applications. – Mattman944 Oct 25 '23 at 10:58
  • If you have the latest, the origins of the book are covered in the preface to the 1st edition. – Peter Smith Oct 25 '23 at 11:14
  • HH is a single book. I don't need 5 years to read that book and understand it… yet it's reasonable to need more than 10 semesters to finish one's degree in EE: that alone should answer your question. If you read that book, you will have an advantage in the first two semesters in the "linear electrical networks" and "circuits involving basic semiconductor devices" lectures that are quite common in some form or other at EE programs, but that's about it, unless you plan to specialize for analog circuit design (which is a really niche specialization at most unis). – Marcus Müller Oct 25 '23 at 15:47
  • (and with "advantage" I mean you might allow yourself some extra rest during around ¼ of these two lectures, so equate it to a month or two of 1.5 hours of additional sleep per week) – Marcus Müller Oct 25 '23 at 15:53

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This is probably an impossible question to answer, as different universities will all offer slightly different offerings. The Art of Electronics is a good book for learning the subject; as mentioned in the comments it focuses on practical examples which has positives and negatives.

There are also elements of an EE degree that are not covered (or only briefly covered) in the Art of Electronics. These include things like computer programming, processor architecture, FPGAs and circuit simulation. So whilst the contents of AoE might serve you well into your final years (and beyond) of an EE degree in one sub-discipline, you might run out of content very quickly in another. As another example, EE degrees often include modules/courses in mathematics, which will not be taught in this book.

As with most things, learning is helped and reinforced by doing. Therefore, reading is one way of understanding knowledge, but actually building or simulating circuits will help reinforce that knowledge.

The other thing to consider is that different books are generally better at teaching different things. For example, if you are interested in switched mode power supplies, there are definitely alternatives that go into more detail. No one book will be able to condense 4/5 years of an EE degree into several hundred pages, so I want to encourage your interest and recommend you look into as many other ways to learn as possible including other books, app notes, simulating, coding and circuit building.

Graham
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H&H will cover much of what an EE student will learn with respect to circuits more thoroughly than an EE curriculum, but some aspects of circuit analysis are not treated at all, such as working in the frequency domain. It's treatment of embedded systems is OK, but also not complete. Of course, there is no practical experience associated with reading a book.

Then, there are aspects of EE education not covered at all: signal processing, programming, fields, random signals, ...

In short, it covers circuits and electronics well, but there's much more to an EE degree than that. For some reason, I haven't seen the book used as a text in an electronics course, and that needs some exploration.

In a parallel derivation of sorts,if H&H covered everything, students would be able to buy one book to cover every one of their engineering courses. It probably could be used for two standard courses in an EE degree -- circuits, and electronics.

Scott Seidman
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  • yes. More than half of the first two years of uni was actually dominantly math, at least for me (lectures: Higher Math I, II, III, complex analysis and integral transforms, probability theory, signals and systems, fields and waves, theory of transmission lines, theory of solid state electronics, basics of control theory, basics of communications technology.) As far as I can tell, HH covers um, in a reasonably good approximation, none of that. – Marcus Müller Oct 25 '23 at 15:49