Kit for Art of Electronics (Horowitz and Hill)?

[Simfish]

Are there any large kits I could buy to practice circuits from the book?

What about kits for any other famous EE textbooks? Especially for digital circuits?

And how expensive would they be?

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I know that it varies from person to person - but - how long do the circuits in the second half of the book take to complete - compared with the circuits in the first half of the book?

 

[fss]

Horowitz and Hill is not really a book that lends itself well to "practice" circuits. There is no pre-made kit that I'm aware of, so it'd likely involve you going to your local RadioShack with a list of part numbers or ordering online from DigiKey.

Most of the circuits in Horowitz are not particularly exciting anyway. You'd probably be better off using Spice or equivalent to save yourself the time and trouble.

 

[Simfish]

Oh okay, interesting. But isn't SPICE only useful for analog circuits? What can be useful for digital circuits?

 

[crono1009]

If you want to simulate digital circuits I recommend logisim; it's a free, very low resource, simple, logic simulator.

http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~burch/logisim/

 

[Topher925]

My advice to you would be to buy a big breadboard and get a bunch of grab bags from www.jameco.com for learning analog stuff. As for digital logic, I never liked simulating digital stuff because in my experience there's no point. My favorite simulation software is solder.

 

[Simfish]

Okay thanks! Why is there no point in simulating digital stuff? (as compared to analog stuff)

 

[berkeman]

Actually on the digital simulation topic, IMO, the best thing you can do is learn Verilog and start simulating Verilog state machines and blocks. That's what you do as an ASIC designer, and the things you learn in this practice will translate directly into useful digital proects and great things to show prospective employers in interviews.

You can prototype the designs as well, using small Xilinx evaluation boards. So instead of building or simulating gate-level circuits, maybe start by writing simple Verilog code, test it with Test Benches, and get to the point where you load it into a Xilinx PROM on an eval board, and test it at that level.

The SPICE simulation of analog circuits is also a very important skill to become comfortable with. I think there's value in building the analog circuits on a breadboard and verifying your simulations with the real circuits (lots of stuff to find out and learn there).

Doing all of that will be great for your learning, and will greatly improve your skillset and your marketability for internships and eventually for your job hunting. Have fun!