INTRODUCTION
You don’t know how lucky you are. You live in high-tech heaven surrounded by lots of useful, entertaining, interesting, necessary, and even addicting elec- tronic products, products you cling to and would not want to give up.
But do you have any idea how many electronic products you own? Do you really know how much electronics influences your life every day? Some of you do, but most of you probably do not because your electronic gadgets are pretty much taken for granted. Yet we spend the better part of our lives working with these devices. Most of us sit in front of a computer all day at work, slouch on the couch in front of the TV at night, listen to our iPods going to and from work, and spend a weekend downloading videos off of the Internet or taking photos with a digital camera. And let’s be clear here, how many text messages did you send today or cell calls did you make? The impact on our lives of all this electronic equipment is almost overwhelming. In this first chapter, I encourage you to think about how electronics impacts your life.
And that brings us to the subject of this book, learning how electronics works. If you want a first book in electronics that gives you the big picture about how electronic equipment works, this is it. I am not going to beat you to death with a lot of complex circuits and theory or math, only what you really need to know. Then I will go on to show you how each and every one of the products you use every day actually works.