3 ms·

The Art of electronics. Learned more from that than I did doing an EE degree at university. It gets used to this day even though I bought this copy in 1995. I h

by cjsuk 9y ago

The Art of electronics. Learned more from that than I did doing an EE degree at university. It gets used to this day even though I bought this copy in 1995. I have the latest edition arriving today.

kunimu 9y ago
I don't know. I'm doing an EE degree at the moment (second year) and AoE isn't that helpful from my view to understand the theoretical side. It'll tell me what an op-amp bandwidth is and the significance of 3dB but it won't tell me why it's that way, or go into why there is a decay at 20dB/decade. It's been more helpful on the practical side of building circuits rather than their analysis, but I don't know if that's the point or not.
- cjsuk 9y ago
  You’ll find when you get into industry that a big chunk of the theoretical side is discarded and most of the job runs on intuition and knowing the gotchas and gluing bits of data sheets together then writing software. That’s what the book covers. Occasionally you’ll need to dig deep into it and particularly if you do RF stuff but that’s about it. I was disappointed for about six months when I landed my first position at a defence contractor when I found out their senior analogue design engineer had a circuit crib book and most of the designs were sourced or bodged from that and then adjusted on a breadboard. I was simply amazed at how informal it was. The stuff worked, was in budget and performed well. Surprisingly mathematical and theoretical knowledge was rarely discussed. The signal processing and software guys did all the legwork really. Me, I ended up writing engineer ERP systems to replace paper and then jumped into the software market. Now I play around with things and I’ve built a lot of stuff without even firing up a calculator or thinking about the theoretical side of things. Everything has a computer in the middle with a little bit of analogue stuff around the edge which you can usually just pick out of the book. Edit: to be clear I know Laplace, Nyquist, how to do FFT/DFT, network theorems etc but I just don’t need them most of the time.
  - sho 9y ago
    > Surprisingly mathematical and theoretical knowledge was rarely discussed Sounds like some direct parallels there with the software industry. I think I have heard CS stuff mentioned precisely once in the last decade, ironically by someone whose code I regarded as overly complicated gobbledygook. The ratio of people who actually use maths and "hardcore" CS in their programming job to those who literally never do is probably 50 to 1.
    - cjsuk 9y ago
      Yes it’s exactly the same. I tend to get some of the difficult and fun tasks like writing parsers and things and that comes along once every couple of years or so :(
lb1lf 9y ago
Amen. AoE, a desk drawer packed with assorted components and a couple of veroboards basically got me through university. Heck, I even got called to an EE professor's office after a circuit design exam - was told a couple of my answers clearly showed I had spent more time studying AoE than the curriculum. "So - we're going to have to give you a mediocre grade, but no worries, you'll do brilliantly in industry; I'd be happy to write you a recommendation to that effect." He actually did; it is framed and proudly displayed on my office wall.
- cjsuk 9y ago
  Haha similar. I had my own lab of skip dived kit in halls. I got told my lab assignment looked like something out of AoE. Couldn’t complain because it worked and had a cheaper BOM than they expected.

by cjsuk 9y ago

The Art of electronics. Learned more from that than I did doing an EE degree at university. It gets used to this day even though I bought this copy in 1995. I have the latest edition arriving today.

kunimu 9y ago

I don't know. I'm doing an EE degree at the moment (second year) and AoE isn't that helpful from my view to understand the theoretical side. It'll tell me what an op-amp bandwidth is and the significance of 3dB but it won't tell me why it's that way, or go into why there is a decay at 20dB/decade. It's been more helpful on the practical side of building circuits rather than their analysis, but I don't know if that's the point or not.

cjsuk 9y ago
You’ll find when you get into industry that a big chunk of the theoretical side is discarded and most of the job runs on intuition and knowing the gotchas and gluing bits of data sheets together then writing software. That’s what the book covers. Occasionally you’ll need to dig deep into it and particularly if you do RF stuff but that’s about it. I was disappointed for about six months when I landed my first position at a defence contractor when I found out their senior analogue design engineer had a circuit crib book and most of the designs were sourced or bodged from that and then adjusted on a breadboard. I was simply amazed at how informal it was. The stuff worked, was in budget and performed well. Surprisingly mathematical and theoretical knowledge was rarely discussed. The signal processing and software guys did all the legwork really. Me, I ended up writing engineer ERP systems to replace paper and then jumped into the software market. Now I play around with things and I’ve built a lot of stuff without even firing up a calculator or thinking about the theoretical side of things. Everything has a computer in the middle with a little bit of analogue stuff around the edge which you can usually just pick out of the book. Edit: to be clear I know Laplace, Nyquist, how to do FFT/DFT, network theorems etc but I just don’t need them most of the time.
- sho 9y ago
  > Surprisingly mathematical and theoretical knowledge was rarely discussed Sounds like some direct parallels there with the software industry. I think I have heard CS stuff mentioned precisely once in the last decade, ironically by someone whose code I regarded as overly complicated gobbledygook. The ratio of people who actually use maths and "hardcore" CS in their programming job to those who literally never do is probably 50 to 1.
  - cjsuk 9y ago
    Yes it’s exactly the same. I tend to get some of the difficult and fun tasks like writing parsers and things and that comes along once every couple of years or so :(

lb1lf 9y ago

Amen. AoE, a desk drawer packed with assorted components and a couple of veroboards basically got me through university. Heck, I even got called to an EE professor's office after a circuit design exam - was told a couple of my answers clearly showed I had spent more time studying AoE than the curriculum. "So - we're going to have to give you a mediocre grade, but no worries, you'll do brilliantly in industry; I'd be happy to write you a recommendation to that effect." He actually did; it is framed and proudly displayed on my office wall.

cjsuk 9y ago
Haha similar. I had my own lab of skip dived kit in halls. I got told my lab assignment looked like something out of AoE. Couldn’t complain because it worked and had a cheaper BOM than they expected.