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I can also highly recommend "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill.
by YZF 2y ago
I can also highly recommend "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill.
- Syzygies 2y agoThat's what I learned from!
- analog31 2y agoI learned from the 1st edition, in 1984. It's worth noting that the book was actually written for scientists rather than engineers. I was a math and physics major. By a long standing tradition, an electronics course is a standard part of the undergrad physics curriculum. My dad had "Electronics for Scientists" by Malmstadt et al., 1962. His employer put a bunch of scientists through an electronics course. The contrast was pretty remarkable. It's all about vacuum tubes, with some introduction of transistors. The 1st edition of AoE had a reasonable amount of material on digital circuits for back then, but I imagine a similar contrast between 1984 and today. The span of 40+ years has certainly changed how I do electronics.
- WalterBright 2y agoAfter The Cat passed, I found a book under her bed entitled "Electronics for Cats". I wonder what she had been plotting.
- weard_beard 2y agoThumbs. They all want thumbs!
- trogdor 2y agoI volunteer at an animal shelter. A few months ago, while entering kitten weights into a database, I looked at the bookshelf above the desk I was sitting at. The first book I saw was “How to Talk to Your Cat About Gun Safety.”
- masto 2y agoI found it impenetrable.
- BenFranklin100 2y agoHorowitz and Hill is the canonical recommendation for novices, and a text that almost no novice actually learns from.
- tonyedgecombe 2y agoLike the dragon book for compilers.
- YZF 2y agoHaving read both of them (well, I had the dragon book as a compiler course textbook, couldn't really read it all, donno who can) I think that's not a fair comparison. AoE is extremely practical. I think the debate here is what exactly are "fundamentals" for electronics. I read AoE with high school physics and some hands on tinkering (mostly with exposure to software in embedded systems) as my background. At that point in my life I found it readable and enjoyable. It will help you get to the next level. Probably skipped some sections that weren't of interest though. I probably built my first electronic circuit in elementary school (some lights, switches, battery, etc.). If you just have no clue of anything electronics then yes, this is not the book for you. But it still is "electronics fundamentals" despite that.
- YZF 2y agoI already knew something by the time I read it so that must have helped. I guess you do need a certain maturity level (in the subject) to get started but once you have it (maybe from somewhere else) I think it's great. It reminds me of my first time trying to learn assembly language when I was in my early teens. I just could not make any sense of it. I knew a little bit of PASCAL and BASIC at the time and that was just alien territory. When I came back a few years later after some exposure then it all came together. Try going back to the book ;)
- vivzkestrel 2y agoi don't recommend this book at all. I know nothing about electronics. Think blank slate and this book went straight over my head. I caught it from the comments of one such post on HN
- _moof 2y agoTry pairing it with the companion "Learning the Art of Electronics." It's a hands-on lab workbook that complements the main book. It's very practical.
- moffkalast 2y agoOr better yet, the "Learning the Learning the Art of Electronics" which breaks down the companion book.
- diggan 2y agoI'm awaiting the blog series that breaks down the breaking down book further, "Learning the Learning the Learning the Art of Electronics".
- rramadass 2y agoAoE is not meant for people who are starting from zero. Pair it with some other "popular electronics" kind of books and it will start making better sense. One recommendation is Practical Electronics for Inventors by Paul Scherz and Simon Monk. For theory see Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits by Anant Agarwal and Jeffrey Lang.
- vivzkestrel 2y agowhile this book is simpler, i am still struggling with a lot of stuff, here page 6 https://imgur.com/a/83FQnAx https://imgur.com/a/83FQnAx What graph did they plot to derive delta Q / delta T I can tell that on the y axis they had time but I would have loved to see a representation of what the curve on the x axis would look like. A wire is uniform only in theory, in reality its area would keep fluctuating at every mm by very small amounts. Does this equation actually take the effect of this fluctuation. What does A1 and A2 look like, I am assuming A2- A1 = delta Q right? There needs to be an even more grounded book in electronics, something that you can show to a guy who literally has no idea about electronics in the slightest bit and by the end of the book, the guy is a master at it
- megadata 2y agoThat's an awful recommendation for an entry level electronics.
- belter 2y agoThat is like recommending a Knuth book for somebody wanting to learn Python.