To the uninitiated, electric circuits can intimidate. Ohm's Law, Kirchhoff's Laws, Thevenin equivalents. Mysterious symbols on schematic diagrams. Resistance, voltage, wattage, and inductance. Important concepts that many people outside of the traditional electric engineering field need to know.



Robert Spence provides a pretty good initiation to the mysteries of electric circuits. With plenty of depth for a beginner, the book starts out in the shallow end of the pool and takes the reader closer to the deep end. There's plenty of depth and breadth for a beginning text. Even, if you hunt for them, some hints of humor. (British humor, it must be said.)



It's not an easy book to study. In places, Spence did not provide enough guidance. I still have trouble, for example, figuring out the direction (plus or minus) of currents and voltages. Getting the sign right is crucial. A little more help there would have helped greatly.



The price tag on this book, like most of its type, is steep. So I was disappointed to find that you need to contact the publisher to get access to the supplemental website. The book has a lot of problems for each chapter (which is good), but answers in the back to only about a third of them. The supplemental website is supposed to have more. But I never received the promised email giving me the password, something that was supposed to happen "shortly."