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I’ve been thinking about buying a copy of this but it seems like a pretty steep price to do in a whim. Is the third edition that much more necessary/ up-to-date than a good used copy of the second as a relative novice? Will I end up learning decades old things that are not relevant now?

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As someone who took EECS and used many old electronics books, you don't need anything newer than probably 1980 to have great electronics knowledge.

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.

for analog IC design, i highly recommend the excellent Designing Analog Chips[1] written by the person who designed the 555 timer. other books are more comprehensive and will give you all the theory, but this book is concise, practical, and free (at least for the pdf version).

[1] http://www.designinganalogchips.com/

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