Hands-On Electronics: A One-Semester Course for Class Instruction or Self-Study

Electronics becomes easier to understand when you can see a circuit respond to a measurement—and then change it, test it, and learn why it behaves that way. Hands-On Electronics brings analog and digital circuit principles together with practical experiments, offering a structured introduction for classroom study or independent learning.

Daniel M. Kaplan and Christopher G. White begin with the tools used to observe and build circuits, then move from foundational components to increasingly capable circuit designs. The emphasis is not only on what a circuit does, but on examining its behavior in practice.

Start with the tools at the bench

The opening chapter introduces the multimeter, breadboard, and oscilloscope—the basic equipment used throughout the book’s circuit work. From there, readers explore capacitors and RC circuits, including voltage dividers, integrators, and high- and low-pass filters.

Follow the path from components to circuits

Diodes, bipolar transistors, and field-effect transistors lead into amplifier circuits, current sources, and switching applications. The treatment of operational amplifiers extends from core principles to signal-processing applications, including differentiation, integration, and rectification. Comparators and oscillators show how feedback can produce useful circuit behavior.

Later material broadens the picture to digital logic, flip-flops, counters, multiplexers, memory, and digital-to-analog conversion. Across these subjects, the book’s combination of explanation and hands-on circuit exploration helps connect individual components with the larger systems they make possible.

For a course—or a self-directed start

Designed as a one-semester course text while also addressing self-study, this book may suit students and curious learners building a grounding in analog and digital electronics. Its progression from equipment familiarization to circuit applications gives readers a clear route through a broad introductory curriculum.

If you want to learn electronics by pairing theory with circuits you can build and test, this book offers a practical place to begin.