He provides a cheat sheet of "Do's and Don'ts":

If you find a free copy, use it as a sampler—but buy the real version. The appendices alone (containing 50+ worked examples) are worth the price. In an era of AI-generated code and parametric search, Maniktala reminds us that power supply design is an art of subtle trade-offs. Optimization is not about maximizing one variable; it is about finding the "sweet spot" where efficiency, cost, and size coexist.

A common mistake is designing by app note. You take an LM5118 datasheet, copy the typical application circuit, and pray. When it fails, you have no diagnostic framework.