A caution for UK readers
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While this book contains a lot of exciting projects, many of them involving very high voltages, very well described, UK readers should be aware that many or most of them require special components that would have to be imported from the USA, from a company associated with the author. You will NOT find them in the Radiospares or Maplin catalogues, and often their specifications are not given in enough detail to even guess at an acceptable substitute.
That said, the book was fun to read and some of the schematics could be useful in other applications.
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Perhaps not for the evil genius but...
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I think one star is a little harsh for this book to say the least; the simple fact is a true evil genius would not require a book to tell them how to conduct/build these experiments. I had no prior knowledge of electronics beyond programming my video and found no problems following the instructions within the book and learned a great deal while doing it. It's a lot of fun and can act as a stepping stone towards other things, most of the projects are quite cheap can be built for around £40-£50... and a lot cheaper if you have friends who do this sort of thing for a living, its also great way to get kids interested in electronics (far better than making a small radio or flickering light).
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Really not worth it.
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This book is really a glorified advertisement for the services of Mr Iannini's company, which supplies many of the things they term "specialist components" It is rather like a Meccanno (Erector) instruction book, for which you discover you have fully 75% of the parts already, but the remaining 25% are not in the box. It may be that you are satisfied with building models from kits of bits, but the spirit once engendered in Scientific American's Amateur Scientist column, which told you, in quite sufficient detail, how to make your own CO2 laser, from SCRATCH, is missing from this book - why one just buys the magic bits from the authors company. What Evil Genius worth his salt is going to buy parts off the shelf, without understanding how they do what they do, and missing the fun of discovery ? YMMV Steve
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United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada