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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

This was my bible as a teenager.

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.

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I took a class where we used Learning the Art of Electronics (with AoE as a reference), and that book was also excellent. Class was taught by a former student of Horowitz and Hill, and one week the OG did the guest lecture! Unforgettable.

I had the cool experience of taking that class from Prof. Horowitz himself. Not only was the class great, but there were lots of stories around the department of him solving electronics problems for other professors’ experiments (my favorite was probably one where a team flew him out to CERN in Switzerland, expecting the problem to take a few days to solve. On the way in from the airport, Horowitz asked them to stop at the lab and show him what was going on. They said there was plenty of time and they would get started the next morning. Horowitz insisted, and they finally relented. They stopped at the lab and showed him the experimental setup and described what wasn’t working. He grabbed a wire, soldered it in, problem was fixed, and he enjoyed a couple of days of vacation in Switzerland.)

I went through every book store in Cambridge this past Fall and couldn't find it. I ended up having to order it from Cambridge University Press (located in the other Cambridge). When I looked through Harvard's course catalog for upcoming semesters it didn't look like AoE was part of the curriculum of Harvard's PHYS 123 anymore. It seems like such a shame. If I'm wrong someone please correct me.

The digital half of class is available via extension (which is how I did it) although it moves at half speed. And for some reason the analog portion hasn’t been offered for a couple of years.

For me, it's probably the best physics book ever written. Something you can actually read from cover to cover.

Indeed, I just checked it online and it is definitely a very informative book.

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