If you click through to the FAQ this is addressed:
"How is this different from The Art of Electronics?
The Art of Electronics is a wonderful book, but doesn't contain a lot of information about the design process. It's mostly theory, which is important, but is missing a lot of the information that I ended up learning the hard way. The Art of Electronics makes a wonderful companion to Designing Electronics that Work."
This seems entirely more digestible than AoE though. Don't get me wrong, I've read that book probably 6 times over in my life - it's fantastic- but it's a university text book. This new book seems aimed at simply getting a product out the door, which is a different but useful niche.
Indeed, and it was written for the typical electronics course that's part of the undergraduate physics curriculum, which is how I encountered it in the early 80s. A year later they switched to a different text because AoE was too hard.
I don't think I've ever met an engineer who used it in college. Except it might be like Messiah's quantum mechanics book -- something you read after you already understand the subject matter. That's why the second through sixth readings are the best. ;-)
But I think the physics students were learning electronics for a different purpose, to support laboratory research, which depends heavily on electronics. The course was expected to be accompanied by a lab, and we had a lot of chances to learn about making and breaking things throughout our degrees. Maybe the electronics course helped us figure out which ones of us became experimentalists, or theoreticians.
And both Electronics and manufacturing were also much more primitive in those days. Real products were closer to our hacked-together prototypes than they are today.
> I don't think I've ever met an engineer who used it in college.
Hey, I did! And I had to teach out of it... that was an experience. (I distinctly remember pulling it out in class one day, as a TA, to show the students a figure that was particularly good... and got yelled at by one kid because "that's not our book" and "we shouldn't have to read that". Even the other kids rolled their eyes at that one.)
It really is a text that's made for physicists and hacker-types. There is a ton of great information on building one-offs and prototypes. Not so much for getting products out (so. many. trimmers.).
Art of Electronics is a 1000+ page textbook and the X chapters add 500 on top of that of circuit theory. This is a 310 page guide on project management and practical application as it relates to electronics.
They are complimentary literature, not competing. Also AoE is not cheap.
