Due to a combination of advances in technology, government legislation, and market forces, the LED lighting market it set to explode. This can be looked at in a number of different lights, from the rather small (home lighting is about to be totally gadget-ified), to the large (about 4 billions light bulbs in the US are going to be replaced, many of them with LED bulbs), to the world-changing (for the first time in history man is providing light for himself without the use of some form of fire). This book focuses on the first of those three: it's a practical, actionable explainer for LED lighting, aimed at the normal, household replacement bulb, but many of the same concept apply to other bulb designs (MR16, PAR) and lighting scenarios. LED bulbs are available, and while they will be changing greatly over the next few years, the core concepts will remain the same. This provides consumers (and, let's face it, geeks) with two interesting questions -- what to do now and what do they need to know about the future.
The book tackles both of those, from explaining the parts of an LED bulb, to talking through some of the interesting challenges manufacturers face, to discussing implications for the future of solid state lighting. It's a mix of the practical and an examination of the LED bulb as a gadget, the way you'd look at a mobile phone or laptop.