Transistor

Principles of Transistor Circuits, Ninth Edition
$63.95
I was looking for a book that addressed small-signal discrete transistor amplifiers, and this book does that very well. The topics presented are all presented clearly and fairly thoroughly. However, I can barely believe that in its 9th edition the volume is published so amazingly poorly. Text in figures (component values, current labels, etc.) is often completely illegible, suffering from severe pixellation and degradation, the likes of which I have seen from poorly inlined PostScript images into TeX typesetting. This is no exaggeration -- the letters cannot be read, they're just little blobs of grey. Furthermore, a key figure in the chapter describing DC biasing of FETs (fig. 6.13) is accidentally split into two separate figures rather than having an a) and b) -- this throws the figure numbering off for the rest of the chapter, which was really confusing until I realized the error.

Summarizing, the text of the book is very good. The actual printed product is low-quality and slipshod. If you can work around the shortcomings, it's a valuable learning tool.

Transistor
$8.99
311 is my favorite band and this album sums it up!
When 311 released Transistor music for me forever changed.
This is by far their best cd to date and i hope the new album in 2009 will be half as good hopefully better we will see.
311s transistor is the best cd ever made. Just listen to it.
It has reggae,rock,punk,trip hop,rap,electronica,jazz, its just the most amazing record ever. 5 stars forever.

Transistor [Explicit]
$9.99
311 is my favorite band and this album sums it up!
When 311 released Transistor music for me forever changed.
This is by far their best cd to date and i hope the new album in 2009 will be half as good hopefully better we will see.
311s transistor is the best cd ever made. Just listen to it.
It has reggae,rock,punk,trip hop,rap,electronica,jazz, its just the most amazing record ever. 5 stars forever.

Transistor Circuit Techniques: Discrete and integrated, Third edition (TUTORIAL GUIDES IN ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING)
$55.95
My experience has been that books published for a UK audience often tend to be somewhat more "application" focused than those books aimed at a U.S. audience, and this book is no exception: While it does have all the standard small signal theory about transistors that you find in pretty much any electronics text, it also has entire chapters on practical (1) audio amplifier and (2) power supply design, which is not the kind of thing you'd expect to find in most electronics texts. This is really great, particularly for those who are using this book on their own (outside of a classroom environment) -- the gap between "theory" and "practice" is much reduced. Additionally, there are answers to every single practice problem (usually about a dozen per chapter) in the back of the book, which makes it ideal for self-study.

A few quick comparisons:

Sedra & Smith, Microelectronic Circuits: S&S is a classic book (and very popular at U.S. colleges). It covers everything this book does, typically in far greater depth and at a much more theoretical level: S&S assume you know a bit of calculus and have covered Laplace transforms (or at least the use of phasors), whereas this books requires little more than high school algebra to fully understand. I do think S&S works fine in a classroom environment, but would not recommend it for self-study. On the other hand, after reading this book, S&S would be a fine reference.

Horowitz & Hill, The Art of Electronics: TAoE has nearly religious significance to some, and for good reason -- it transcends many, many different areas of circuit design (everything in this book plus microcontrollers, much fancier amplifier applications, low noise/high speed design, and even a bit of fabrication), and (like this book) tries to avoid the need for anything behind high school math (sometimes it just isn't possible, though). However, H&H specifically avoids "traditional" small signal models, and while I can understand the desire to do this, I sometimes think it hampers one's intuition if you haven't gone through a few rounds of standard circuit analysis with those models. As such, reading this book *before* H&H will, in my opinion, let you have a greater appreciation for the genius that H&H demonstrate in their own tome. (One common complaint you hear about H&H is that they have sections of "bad circuit ideas" -- which is great -- but for beginners sometimes one just doesn't have the background or skill to figure out WHY they're bad, and "solutions in the back of the book" would have been greatly appreciated.)

The price of this book strikes me as a bit high for a 224-page paperback, but I suppose it's about the going rate these days for texts.

This book is now over 15 years old, and a "refresh" -- with a bit more emphasis on computer-aided design -- would be a nice improvement, even though it's still excellent without these modern considerations. (I'd like to see the author do this "facelift" though -- Bowick's "RF Circuit Design" had such an update a couple years ago, and while it does add value to that book, the added material was written by different authors and it really shows.) Another nice addition would be a list of "popular" transistors and ICs for specific tasks, like H&H provide: They concentrate on what's readily available in the U.S., and while this book gives passing mention to a few such popular devices in the UK, more comprehensive tables would be great.