"High Speed Digital Design" generally refers to PCB level design. The Black Magic books are pretty old, covering ancient stuff like DIP packages on manhattan-routed boards. These days the keyword is SI/PI (Signal Integrity, Power Integrity).

I'm not familiar with that book but I just looked at some previews and it seems to be exactly what I'm getting at. I built a large number of radio transmitters in my younger years (long story) in the 100 MHz range, that was all analog so I had a pretty good idea of what it was like to design high frequency stuff, or so I thought. Then I tried to do a bunch of digital circuits at 1/10th that frequency and even after only a hand full of components in a circuit you'd get the weirdest instabilities. From there to the point that you can reliably design digital circuitry is a fascinating journey and gives you infinite respect for what goes on under the hood of a modern day computer.

Yes, and a reason for it subtitle "A Handbook of Black Magic" :). In the olden days EEs would more or less guess by intuition and heavy sprinkling or randomly placed pullups/pulldowns/capacitors to force designs into stable working order.

https://hackaday.com/2019/01/24/video-putting-high-speed-pcb...

Dont remember the exact video, but Bill Herd mentioned many times about on site last minute fab fixes involving prodding the product on a hunch of where the problem might be.

Today you can simulate and measure pretty much everything, plus automated design rule tools will warn you of potential problems beforehand.