As soon as you mentioned books I had a flashback to R. A. Penfold - and I was pleased you mentioned him. It didn't occur to me, at the time, it might have been

As soon as you mentioned books I had a flashback to R. A. Penfold - and I was pleased you mentioned him. It didn't occur to me, at the time, it might have been a pen-name. As you say the author was very prolific. I still have a couple of those books, though I moved away from hardware without delving too deeply. It's only recently I've started tackling hardware again, but these days I think of microcontrollers and microprocessors which can be programmed, rather than discrete components. At the time the most I'd have touched would have been the odd op-amp, and the 555.