The Art of Electronics (2015)
artofelectronics.net
artofelectronics.net
I just pulled it down from the shelf to comment, and literally a bunch of wires and solder blobs fell out on my desk.
Imho what sets it apart is chapter 10 (Minicomputers) which gives you enough to understand and build a simple microprocessor board, and chapter 12 (Construction Techniques) that sets you up to build things properly. Without this I wouldn't have progressed to Alan Clements' "Microprocessor Systems Design" and got my first 68000 design working.
What a wonderful gift to the world. thanks mssrs. Horowitz and Hill.
In grad school, my advisor recommended this book, saying, "it will be right up your alley." I bought the second edition, and it was. It is truly a graduate level course in circuit design. I started reading this book (2nd edition) front-to-back, and when I finished it, I started again. It helped me innumerable times when I quit grad school and entered industry.
When the third edition came out, I was at Google in Cambridge, and Horowitz came to talk. I had bought a counterfeit copy from Amazon (by accident), and while he didn't sign it then, he did sign it later (when I got a real copy).
Personally, I think it's worth owning both the second and third editions of this book. It is truly one of the best books about electrical engineering out there.
OTOH, the "X Chapters" of the 3rd edition is one of those analog-guru secret handshake books where The Masters take the Apprentice deep into the bowels of kick-butt analog engineering. Where simplification are eschewed for the Real Answers. https://x.artofelectronics.net/
What little the 3rd ed. does say about construction techniques isn't particularly helpful (or even true), such as when they exaggerate the challenges of working with SMT parts on page 65. It was probably better that they didn't try to go any deeper.
I can't really say I've gotten my money's worth, but there's still time. I still want to learn more electronics, but I was left wondering "what's next?" at the end of my Physics BA classes and I haven't stumbled onto the answer yet.
You're entitled to your opinions about what a book should cost, but facts are facts, and the author did not write what you said they wrote.
Yes, I combined the author's warning with the book's price.
Inflation of textbook prices is a real problem, finding ways to make them affordable in other countries where people have less to spend is a worthy goal, and you won't aid the cause by falsely attributing words or intentions to people.
Also, the refusal to sign such affordable edition of the book is another *ss move from the author.
Anyone can go look at what the author wrote, and contrast it with the comment that kicked this thread off ("As the author claims on his website, if the price is affordable then it is counterfeit"), and decide whether you've represented the author accurately. I guess if they made it this far into the comment thread without doing that, I'd encourage them to do that.
In addition to being dishonest, your use of logic is pretty bad. That the author indicates a counterfeit of his book might be identified prior to purchase by a price that is "too low to be creditable" is not an admission by the author that he believes his book to be overpriced or unaffordable.
> Also, the refusal to sign such affordable edition of the book is another *ss move from the author.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, your opinion, man.
https://artofelectronics.net/lebowski/
But that "affordable edition" of the book was a counterfeit that didn't earn the author or his publisher any money - the money went to a counterfeiter. Increasing the value of the book by signing it wouldn't be most authors' first impulse.
I can really recommend it as a starting point from no/minimal knowledge to having a good overview of the key concepts.
It doesn't cover (at least the 2nd ed didn't) fancy digital stuff (modern microcontrollers, USB, FPGAs, etc) but there are great free online resources for that.
I found that I clicked much better with MIT's Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits.
I whipped out every trick in chapters 5 and 7. I transcribed the massive opamp tables into excel to get a lay of the land and was able to find even newer models that exceeded. I settled on OPA4189 for gain, OP224B for isolation, and OPA1633 for output driving / final gain. It's out to fab now.
I initially wanted to use AD since they're the local guys and I like their style more than TI (who came off as a bit culty in their recruiting). Well all of AD's designs still in production for isolation are 5V supply max. What am I supposed to do with that? Analog inputs do best with bipolar 10V. I'm not eating into my noise budget and adding BOM/complexity because a vendor doesn't feel like making the high quality parts that they used to.
Great work but be sure to check the extensive errata: https://artofelectronics.net/errata/
of course many factual books have less reported errors per page, but that's not at all the same thing
I can appreciate the point of view that self discovery of the answer is an important path to learning, but you never know if you are learning the correct lesson. I fortunately had a understanding chief engineer who helped guide me in my early career before I moved to software.
A real divider:
Input o----vvvvv----o-------------o Output
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Input o-------------o----vvvvv----o Output
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(Edit: it appears I don't understand linebreaks on HN, so things are gonna appear garbled until I fix it.)
(Edit 2: Fixed.)
I tried to read it through straight, but got pretty lost somewhere in the transistor section.
The bad news: I still suck at electronics.
The good news: I have this book on hand as a reference.
For better, or for worse: You can get quite far these days being an IC baby. Connect pin A to pin B by apeing data sheet reference diagrams. Electronics-by-numbers, perhaps. So, for better or for worse, electronics fundamentals is only a hard-requirement if you're the one designing the ICs. (Even with RF, there are modules, and IC filters) You can likely think of several programming analogies.
You can make practical devices by learning an EDA tool like KiCad, get familiar with how to choose parts, and get a feel for how to quickly/effectively extract the info you need from datasheets for various part classes.
If you are looking to design those parts, you need the skills in this book.
Last week I've ordered a book from Amazon Italy (A Little Java, A Few Patterns) only to receive what I do consider a very low quality copy of the book and somehow different edition despite having both the original and this "copy" same ISBNs: https://www.amazon.it/Little-Java-Few-Patterns/dp/0262561158 and here's the cover of the original one: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262561150/a-little-java-a-few-p... Not only covers are different (the title in the copy is actually shifted to the rightmost part just as seen in Amazon which immediately makes you think about a counterfeit copy) but the quality of the paper, quality of the cover (both front and back cover bend) and print are different. It feels like the book was printed by a copy center.
Taking a more detailed look at the back it turns out that these alternate versions are printed by Amazon in Italy (despite the fun fact that the very first page states that indeed the copy I have was printed and bound in the USA).
So be very careful to purchase books from Amazon, you can get surprises like these. I used to buy from book depository and as it was indeed another business from Amazon I thought that they would still offer quality books behind scenes, but it seems to be room for Amazon to now also get involved in the business of printing low quality books.
While I was confirmed that indeed the copy I received is not a counterfeit I find it very dodgy for Amazon to do this without at least explicitly mention it in the site.
If you stay in electronics you'll end up with this book sooner or later though.
I am a huge fan of the Forrest Mims books and "Practical Electronics for Inventors".
AoE is great, but not a beginners book. More important than any book is building and understanding circuits.
More recently I've been dabbling with electronics again. Someone recommended Malvino's "Electronic Principles" (I bought the 5th Edition second hand), which I found much clearer for circuit theory than AoE. Sedra and Smith will probably be my next purchase but I doubt it should be your first.
Also, "beginner" could mean a lot of different things. And perhaps more important than where you're at, where do you want to get to? There's a world of difference between (1) soldering together someone else's design, (2) being able to understand why someone else's design works, (3) being able to piece something together from common sub-circuits, (4) produce your own design from scratch. And all of these will vary depending on the circuit type: analog/digital/RF etc.
But that's not necessarily an unreasonable hurdle. After all, electronics is about something that happens physically, and maybe getting some tactile experience gets the right brain cells working to be receptive to the theory. Or maybe it's just that the enjoyment of the physical stuff supplies the motivation to learn the textbook stuff.
I might think along similar lines if someone asked for a good textbook to learn how to play the cello.
When I took electronics in college, from 1st edition AoE, I had already been tinkering with circuits for a few years. And playing the cello. ;-)
as far as a book, i do agree with @nhatcher , i loved Practical Electronics for Inventors but that was before the internet really took over.
If you're interested in Analog (designing transistors in Cadence) and Digital design (making your own CPU in Verilog / VHDL), newer materials make sense because of improvements to processes for analog and FPGA capabilites for digital.
For discrete electronics projects (learning about all the components and their uses) and understanding circuit design etc, anything old is as good as anything new.
I feel it's only praised bc it's comprehensive and historically important
It's a horrible way to learn electronics
I agree that you should not learn from this book from zero. The first few chapters attempt to be an intro but it's not intended to be a gentle introduction.
For instance, on my own I was able to identify a bad opamp on the in input section of a mixer and rework it (after replacing a bunch of electrolytics and a couple smd transistors, cause I am a novice at this kind of work). Still, I'm not totally a stranger to electronics.
I started in on that book- I kind of agree with the preceding comments.
I plan to come back to it, but I have been watching a lot of youtube, and that has felt a lot more helpful in a lot of ways. I mostly am interested in learning to reason about what is happening in analog circuits so I can eventually clone some instruments and signal processing- maybe I am not the audience for the book.
Like Aaron Lanterman's lectures at Georgia Tech are feeling a whole lot more useful to my interests (granted, I am mostly trying to understand analog electronics because that is what folks bring me that need to be fixed).
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOunECWxELQSbOv3ekzuw...
Similarly, following Moritz Klein's discussions has been quite helpful... the whole "here is what we're going to build" and then following through with things has felt very siilar to Ben Eater's series on microprocessors.
Still, the chummy ivy-leage tone of TAE wasn't super duper fun for me. I will probably keep returning to it until I can get through it quickly, but for my purposes (and I suspect a lot of folks who aren't on an academic path) it's not maybe the quickest, strongest path to a lot of ends.
It especially shines if you need the first principles of precision amplification.
i certainly haven't read through it like a novel, though! it's more like, read a few pages, draw a few schematics, run a few simulations, write a few pages of notes, repeat. sometimes the pages are pages i've read previously. plausibly i'll never finish the book, and that's fine with me
i find it both more accessible and more reliable than commonly suggested alternatives like sedra & smith; what alternative would you recommend?
Highly recommend buying the paper edition.
i suspect that in this case it's because two comments on the nand2tetris thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735066 recommended the book (which i remember because i wrote one of them)
possibly if this thread is of interest to you, that one will be too
It is good.
Really started to start digging into the former! Any tips for getting through such a massive tome, or is it really something you can just run through front to back?
And for the hands-on lab course book, are the parts lists provided still the best way to get the components, or have there been better ways since its publication? Some of the prices of the tools are pretty daunting.
Unfortunately a lot of the parts on the lab course's list are end of life now, and it's not always clear what you can substitute them with. There aren't always replacement parts with the exact same specs on digikey. I did source a couple parts through eBay.
Additionally, there are parts that aren't in the BOM that are used in the lab course. An early one has you doing a test against a black box with something inside it, and the book only tells you later what was supposed to be inside it. I think there's a basic control theory chapter at some point, and there are parts in that chapter that weren't in the BOM.
Ultimately, I got frustrated with the book continuing to ask me to use stuff I didn't know I was supposed to have, and gave up. It got annoying having to get partially through a chapter, order something, wait for it to arrive, then continue. Maybe I would have stuck with it if I'd checked up-front what I was expected to have for all the chapters, and got EVERYTHING in advance. (but again I think it's going to get harder and harder to actually buy what's in the BOM as time goes on)