How I Actually Used This Book to Learn Electronics
I found the All New Electronics Self Teaching Guide floating around on an old radio repair forum in 2019. Someone linked to a PDF and said it was better than the community college course they took. I downloaded it, opened it, and spent the next eight months going through it cover to cover while building a handful of terrible projects that almost certainly caught fire at some point. The book works because it forces you to solve problems before it explains the theory behind them. That sounds counterintuitive. Most textbooks lead with definitions, then examples, then a practice set at the end of the chapter. Gonzalez flips that. He puts a circuit in front of you and asks what you think will happen when you close the switch. You guess wrong. Then he explains why you were wrong. The failure stick with you longer than a definition you memorized and forgot by Tuesday.
All New Electronics Self Teaching Guide — What It Actually Covers
The guide starts with basic DC circuits and works through resistors, capacitors, inductors, transformers, AC theory, semiconductors, and eventually op-amps and basic digital logic. The math is algebra-level. You need to know how to rearrange a linear equation and understand what Ohm's Law means beyond the formula itself. If you can't do that, the book will frustrate you in about forty pages and you will close it forever. The self-test format is the real differentiator. Each chapter has quiz questions interspersed throughout. The answers are in the back, but the explanations accompany each answer, so you don't just learn the correct choice, you learn why the other three are wrong. That part matters more than most people realize. Eliminating wrong answers teaches you to spot miswired circuits and component mismatches faster than any lab exercise does.
Where the Book Falls Apart
I want to be clear about the limitations because nobody else will tell you. The guide was first published in the 1960s and revised in 2008. The semiconductor sections reflect that era. MOSFETs, modern CMOS logic families, switching regulators, and microcontroller-based design are basically absent. If you finish this book expecting to understand how a ESP32 board works or how a buck converter regulates voltage, you will walk away with serious gaps. The transistor chapters cover BJTs and JFETs adequately but treat modern power MOSFETs as an afterthought. The layout is dense. Every page is packed with diagrams, equations, and marginal notes. Your eyes will glaze over if you try to power through it quickly. I learned that the hard way. I finished chapter six in a single sitting and could not have told you the difference between series and parallel resonance if my life depended on it. I went back and spent three weeks on that one chapter instead. The book rewards patience. It punishes speed-reading. There is also a practical issue with the self-test approach that the publisher never addresses. Some of the answer explanations reference earlier problem numbers that got reformatted in different printings. I hit this around chapter ten when the answer key pointed me to a figure that did not exist in my copy. It took me twenty minutes to trace the correct reference by cross-referencing the diagram captions. If you run into this, do not assume you are reading it wrong. Check the diagram numbers in the chapter body first, then check the answer explanation. Usually the content is still there, just numbered differently.
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How to Actually Get Through It Without Quitting
Set aside two hours on a weekend, sit at a workbench or a desk with paper and a calculator, and do one chapter. Do not multitask. Do not watch YouTube in the background. The problems require actual attention. When the book asks you to predict what a circuit will do, actually predict it before you look at the answer. Writing down your reasoning, even if it is wrong, is where the learning happens. Skipping ahead to the answer is the fastest way to waste the book. Build the circuits. The book does not ask you to build anything, but you should. A breadboard, a variable power supply, a multimeter, and a bag of common resistors and capacitors cost about eighty dollars if you buy from Mouser or Digi-Key. I bought a used EICO 420 bench power supply on eBay for forty-five dollars and a cheap Tenma multimeter for twenty. That setup is enough to verify nearly every example in the first five chapters. When you get to the AC sections, a function generator becomes useful. I used a used Siglent SDG1032X for about two hundred dollars. It is overkill for this book, but the waveform output lets you actually see what a phase shift looks like on an oscilloscope instead of just calculating one. I wish I had done that earlier. Reading about phase angle is abstract until you see two sine waves on a screen and watch the waveform shift as you change frequency.
There is one specific moment in the transformer chapter where I ran into a real problem. The book describes ideal transformer behavior and then gives you a problem where the secondary is loaded. The calculation assumes perfect coupling and no winding resistance. I built the circuit exactly as shown, measured the output, and the voltage was twelve percent lower than the calculation predicted. I spent an afternoon trying to find a mistake in my wiring before I realized the book was asking for ideal results and the real world disagreed. The workaround is to calculate for ideal conditions first, then add a twenty percent margin for real component tolerance when you are actually building something. The book will not tell you that. It expects you to figure it out on your own.
What Comes After
Once you finish the guide, you will understand circuit analysis at a level that many associate degree programs take a full semester to reach. You will also know enough to start reading datasheets without immediately closing the document. From there, pick up either Horowitz and Hill's The Art of Electronics for practical design intuition, or Sadiku's Principles of Electric Circuits if you want more formal coverage of network analysis and Laplace transforms. The All New Electronics Self Teaching Guide is not a complete education. It is a foundation. It will not teach you PCB layout, impedance matching for RF, or thermal management for power supplies. It will teach you how to think about circuits in a way that makes all of those later topics less intimidating. I have recommended it to roughly a dozen people over the years. About half of them finished it. The other half stopped around the inductor chapter and went back to watching YouTube videos. The ones who finished it can troubleshoot a power supply, design a simple amplifier, and read a schematic without panicking. That is what the book does.
