Ah, do they mean April 1st?
The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition, to be released April 2015
31–40 of 98 posts
Re: The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition, to be released April 2015
#32I have a MS in CSCI, PhD in cognitive psych, but know nothing at all about electronics. Is this a reasonable first book? I ask bc somebody compared it to TAOCP which I would not recommend to somebody with zero CSCI/programming skills.
EDIT: thanks for the feedback, I'll look elsewhere to get my feet wet.
Re: The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition, to be released April 2015
#33I have a MS in CSCI, PhD in cognitive psych, but know nothing at all about electronics. Is this a reasonable first book? I ask bc somebody compared it to TAOCP which I would not recommend to somebody with zero CSCI/programming skills. EDIT: thanks for the feedback, I'll look elsewhere to get my feet wet.
There is a lot of good introductory type material, but the book treats many slightly advanced topics as though they are casual, and skips around topics plenty. An example would be how quickly (within the 1st chapter) Thevenin circuits come up. I remember taking an entire semester to get to these in my EE coursework.
Many may say otherwise, but I would argue that this is a better reference than it is a book to learn electronics from the ground up, but that doesn't mean that you can't use it as a guide as you learn and look elsewhere for missing info.
Re: The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition, to be released April 2015
#34This is offtopic, but I need to ask this question and I fear I may loose the opportunity to field it to this audience of experts. I'm interested in two things and am wondering if this book, or something else, would be of use to me. Assume I have strong math background, and assume I understand the Maxwell equations. What book/resource provides a good understanding of the approximations (from first principles) needed t…
If you threw out an off topic post and actually put contact information in your profile, and I had something to add, I would email you and nobody here would care (although your off topic post might get downvoted into oblivion) but submitting an off topic post with no way to contact you is not very useful.
"with no way to contact you"
Why doesn't the "reply" button suffice? Other people may be interested in the answers.
Re: The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition, to be released April 2015
#35I learned from the 1st edition, back in 1983, when I took the electronics course for physics majors. I think it's the best textbook I've ever used, in any subject. I fell in love with analog electronics. Note my HN user name. ;-) What's happened with analog since then? I believe that opto-electronics is much more important today, as are switchmode circuits. Some things, like systematic noise budgeting, will never go…
What happened? Digital and moore's law took over. The microprocessor continues to absorb every function that, at one point, made economical sense to do in the analog domain. I share your lament, but reality instructs us to condition signals and supply voltage properly, and let the micro take it from there. It's only going to become more true as time moves on, so learn programming. Get very good at it.
Upvoted. I definitely agree that many erstwhile "analog" functions have joined the dark side. ;-) And I've been programming digital / analog systems since the early 80s.
But I think that two challenges / opportunities remain for analog. The first is that advances in digital capabilities place new demands on analog. For instance, the possibility of higher sampling rates and bit depths requires us to go back and update transducer preamps.
Second, some archaic skills can still be lucrative if the number of practitioners decreases faster than the number of remaining applications. I'm still betting my career on the need for somebody to care about physics, while also knowing how to program. At my workplace, I am possibly the last remaining person who knows how to compute a noise budget that includes transducers, analog signals, and digital processing, in an instrumentation system.
Horowitz and Hill had a chapter, "Digital Meets Analog" that discuss ways that digital designers have to keep up with analog concepts. The ways that digital systems can go wrong are often analog.
Re: The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition, to be released April 2015
#36FYI Amazon appears to have it for $12 less, including shipping: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz/dp/0...
Re: The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition, to be released April 2015
#37I have a MS in CSCI, PhD in cognitive psych, but know nothing at all about electronics. Is this a reasonable first book? I ask bc somebody compared it to TAOCP which I would not recommend to somebody with zero CSCI/programming skills. EDIT: thanks for the feedback, I'll look elsewhere to get my feet wet.
No, don't start with this book. Start with something focused on beginners like Make: Electronics by Charles Platt.
Re: The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition, to be released April 2015
#38I have a MS in CSCI, PhD in cognitive psych, but know nothing at all about electronics. Is this a reasonable first book? I ask bc somebody compared it to TAOCP which I would not recommend to somebody with zero CSCI/programming skills. EDIT: thanks for the feedback, I'll look elsewhere to get my feet wet.
Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest Mims III.
It's got happy little pictures of electrons. :)
Re: The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition, to be released April 2015
#39I learned from the 1st edition, back in 1983, when I took the electronics course for physics majors. I think it's the best textbook I've ever used, in any subject. I fell in love with analog electronics. Note my HN user name. ;-) What's happened with analog since then? I believe that opto-electronics is much more important today, as are switchmode circuits. Some things, like systematic noise budgeting, will never go…
What happened? Digital and moore's law took over. The microprocessor continues to absorb every function that, at one point, made economical sense to do in the analog domain. I share your lament, but reality instructs us to condition signals and supply voltage properly, and let the micro take it from there. It's only going to become more true as time moves on, so learn programming. Get very good at it.
General purpose digital computation is often power limited (either from the supply energy or thermals of the device) and there is an (academic) resurgence of analog computation on data prior to digital blocks to reduce the power footprint of a part. Most applications of this are RF. Conditioning signals as you say these days and in the future isn't just bandwidth limiting and shifting the baseband.
Re: The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition, to be released April 2015
#40I have a MS in CSCI, PhD in cognitive psych, but know nothing at all about electronics. Is this a reasonable first book? I ask bc somebody compared it to TAOCP which I would not recommend to somebody with zero CSCI/programming skills. EDIT: thanks for the feedback, I'll look elsewhere to get my feet wet.
AoE is comparable to TAOCP only in legendary status. As a point of reference, AoE is the standard textbook for teaching practical electronics to undergraduate physics students at many universities (e.g. UC Berkeley).