Excerpt from the Preface: Who's the Student Manual for?
The students this course might suit
These notes arose out of a course at Harvard; they define what we try to teach in that busy term. The course does less than all of Horowitz and Hill, of course. We treat chapters 1-11, omitting Chapter 7, on Precision Circuits..., which is more specialized than the rest, and skimming Chapter 4 on Active Filters and Oscillators. Even this selection includes more information than we expect students to absorb fully on a first pass through the book. This Manual tries to guide students to the most important material.
The typical student that we see--if there really is a typical student--is an undergraduate majoring in Physics, and wanting to learn enough electronics to let him or her do useful work in a laboratory. But we do not assume such background in these notes. Students very different from that typical student thrive in our course. Graduate students in the sciences appear regularly; during the summer we see many high school students, and some of these do brilliantly; now and then a professor of Physics takes the course (and they do all right, too!). In the 'extension' version of the course, we see lots of programmers who want to know what's going on in their machines, and we see people who just happen to be curious about electronics. That curiosity, in fact, is the only prerequisite for this course, and suggests the only good rule to define who will enjoy it. Someone looking for an engineering course will find our treatment oddly informal, but a person eager to learn how to design useful circuits will like this course.