McGraw Hill – Dictionary of Electronics

Revised after 20 years, this fifth edition contains 14,000 entries, 1,200 of them new, and 150 new illustrations. The brief definitions are written for laypersons, and care has been taken to include such phrases as binary-to-decimal conversions as well as derivations of acronyms and abbreviations. Few of the definitions include more than one meaning for a term, and mathematical equations are infrequent. The illustrations are line drawings, easy to comprehend and trace if need be. There are no added features included as appendixes.

The dictionary faces competition from a new work prepared by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), The New IEEE Standard Dictionary of Electrical and Electronics Terms (1993). IEEE contains more definitions, which are keyed to current IEEE and ANSI standards. These definitions are highly technical, with math symbols and equations incorporated in lengthly definitions that are often full-blown discussions. IEEE is also well illustrated. The McGraw-Hill dictionary contains 35 definitions for words or phrases beginning with power, three of which run to 10 lines; the IEEE has more than 100, some of them covering up to three or four columns.