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Comment by tshirttime | Hacker News Reader

Dense, wordy, incomprehensible. Phys123 alum here.

Yeah, I have no idea what's going on in the comment section. The book is incredibly inaccessible and at least 9 out of 10 students aren't able to read through it

I feel it's only praised bc it's comprehensive and historically important

It's a horrible way to learn electronics

This book is an excellent discussion of electronics once you have a working knowledge of basic circuits. The fact that they touch on so much in the book makes it useful as a "Wikipedia" starting point.

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.

This year I started picking up on fixing analog electronics as an extension of my stage hand/ audio engineering/ etc work. It's fun and feels nice when I can actually fix something, plus it's a cash business.

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.

a more useful book for audio electronics is Handbook for Sound Engineers by Ballou. there are detailed discussions of common preamp circuits, equalizers, and that sort of thing.

I find the style a bit rambly and even though it's long it doesn't spend too much time on most topics. It really shines when you're a practicing engineer 5+ years out of school and want something to explain how to whip up the circuit that you know you've learned exists in the past.

It especially shines if you need the first principles of precision amplification.

it's neither comprehensive nor, as far as i know, historically important, but i've sure learned a lot about electronics from it

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?

How can it be dense and wordy at the same time? One is the opposite of the other.

Terse and wordy would be opposites. Dense means thick with verbiage like a forest thick with foliage.

Don't even think about RDH4.

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