Book excerpt: A substantial update of his earlier IEE book, Modern Electronic Test and Measuring Instruments, the author provides a state-of-the art review of modern families of digital instruments. For each family he covers internal design, use and applications, highlighting their advantages and limitations from a practical application viewpoint.The book also treats new digital instrument families such as DSOs, Arbitrary Function Generators, FFT analysers and many other common systems used by the test engineers, designers and research scientists.