Build Your Own Printed Circuit Board

Rating:
Summary: A cut and paste of eagle manual
Review: A big portion of this book is literally a cut and paste version of eagle manual and screen snapshots. If you have slightly ECE and chemistry background, you will find this is an almost useless book. I give it one star because this book collected some useful URLs. However, you can always find those links through online search engines. Don't waste your money on it.

In addition, the preface of this book contains some inappropriete politics story that ruins a technical title.

Rating:
Summary: XYZ's of Circuit Board Design & Construction
Review: Mr. Williams has provided a unique guide for the neophyte and experienced designer in the art of designing circuit boards on a shoestring. The book and accompanying CD contains everything required to gain proficiency in schematic capture and PC board layout. The book goes beyond design and provides the processes and procedures to interact with contract board houses to produce high quality professional circuit boards. I recommend this book to anyone involved in the design and fabrication of electronic circuits.

Rating:
Summary: XYZ's of Circuit Board Design & Construction
Review: Mr. Williams has provided a unique guide for the neophyte and experienced designer in the art of designing circuit boards on a shoestring. The book and accompanying CD contains everything required to gain proficiency in schematic capture and PC board layout. The book goes beyond design and provides the processes and procedures to interact with contract board houses to produce high quality professional circuit boards. I recommend this book to anyone involved in the design and fabrication of electronic circuits.

Rating:
Summary: Great place to start learning PCB design
Review: This is a really good book for people who wants to learn how to design PC board for home projects. I've been doing electronics design professionally for over 20 years and have interfaced with many PCB designers during the years so I knew some of the basic concepts already, but this book took me through all the details about the actual process of building a PCB from start to finish. All relevant points of do it yourself PCB design is covered. Author uses Eagle CAD software to take you through the design process which I think is a good choice because this software is integrated from schematic capture to auto board layout and design checking - something all modern board designer need's to be familiar with. The freeware version of this software is included in the accompanying CD but it didn't load the way it is mentioned in the instruction at the back of the book. A newer version of this software is available as a download, so this is the version I've used. Other useful information was about the different methods you can use to manufacture the actual PCBs from board materials to chemicals that are available. Sources of where to obtain these materials are listed also. I agree with the other reader about wishing that chapter on custom library generation was more robust, but overall, this book gave me enough details to tackle my projects comfortably. You won't learn a 100 MHz+ board layout technique from this book, but you need expensive software to do those designs ( Which most of us don't have access to anyways ). At 197 pages, book was an easy read too.

Rating:
Summary: A good solid piece of information
Review: This is a very useful book as the author walks the reader through the different steps necessary to build a PCB. The book is focused on a particular software tool although it does not make it less useful. However, it would have been better if the author had used the name of the software package described as part of the title of the book... I would have bought it earlier!

In a new edition, Mr. Williams should rewrite and expand Chapter 5 (Custom libraries). This is the most difficult part of using the software, and I feel that it was treated quite lightly. It would have been much better if he would walk the reader step by step in this complex process. I would like to see this chapter with additional, detailed information.

Overall, this is a good book that will save a lot of time and frustration!