The Secret Life of Circuits
blog.coredump.cx
blog.coredump.cx
> Once again, we don’t have a satisfying explanation why. We know that these quantum numbers correspond to standing-wave solutions of a three-dimensional wave function that we pulled out of thin air. We also know that the model works better than any alternatives. But we don’t know what any of it really means — or if it means anything.
It is so refreshing to see this explicated thus; physics textbooks are generally coy about "know this for now, and there will be deeper insights available later" but they typically never level with readers and say "we don't know".
This was the book used by MIT in 2007 for the first course in the EE and CS programs. It is that year's course that is on their Open Courseware platform [1], and the readings list there links to a full PDF of the book.
(Edit: click the book title on the readings page, not the "View e-book version" link. See my response to groos' comment below for details).
This is not a link to a pirated copy BTW. Agarwal is a pioneer in the open-education movement and the authors intentionally arranged for an open access PDF.
The lecture videos on Open Courseware are very good too.
[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-002-circuits-and-electronics-s...
The whole thing is organized around building explicit abstractions. You’re always making models, and choosing what to pay attention to and what to ignore. By making the real circuit match the model closely enough, you get to ignore the circuit and use it as building block for bigger things. This same approach is used from resistors to amplifiers to logic gates to CPUs.
Of course this how engineering actually works, but I haven’t seen an intro course presented this way so rigorously. If you’re a software person who deals with black box abstractions all day, it feels like home.
The course introduces concepts in order of simplicity, meaning you get MOSFETs and digital gates before you get BJTs. Many courses are arranged chronologically, so after you do Ohm’s law and capacitors you get dumped into BJTs, which are one of the most complicated things in the discrete toolkit, and hardly ever found in common use nowadays (except as cheap switches). Instead, you’re happily making amplifiers, switches, and logic with FETs, a much gentler introduction.
I also remember somewhere in the course lectures the professor says (paraphrased) “You may be thinking, why do I need to learn how a logic family works? Won’t I just be using some existing chip? This is MIT — you’re supposed to be the one making the chip.”
Click the book's title in the paragraph above that, where it says this:
> Agarwal, Anant, and Jeffrey H. Lang. Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Elsevier, July 2005. ISBN: 9781558607354.
That takes you to a PDF.
Sorry for not being more specific. I didn't even notice the "View e-book version" as I only went to the site to remind myself of the name of the book, saw the title was a link, and clicked it. Then I thought "Why is MIT linking to a pirate copy of a book from one of their own professors?", and did a little Googling to get some backstory.
Here is the PDF they link to: https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_120/Agarwal%20...
1. https://youtu.be/pDELW2pIvWw?si=BNsURdXrGLlaAfF3 (Digital Electronic)
2. https://youtu.be/RG3eljmqyq4?si=Pnbvf6P6HbFcIa1v (Alternating Current, Motors, & control)
3. https://youtu.be/nYuVSG89vg0?si=Oe3ZdJojS7T_iGxK (Electric Basic Made is Easy), and
the episode of "Nand to Tetris"
I’ve been a software engineer for the last couple of decades and I’ve tinkered with microcontrollers as a hobby but always been limited by my lack of electronics knowledge - very much trial and error to get a project far enough to be able to focus on the firmware (which is more my domain). I want to bridge the knowledge gap there.
My only formal electronics education was first year introduction to analog and digital circuits module at university two decades ago, led by a lecturer who assumed students had a huge corpus of pre-existing knowledge (and who I now suspect would have preferred to be supervising his PhD students and conducting research but had to make up the teaching hours - which I do understand).
I will definitely pick up a copy. However, Amazon UK (to avoid the NoStarch UPS shipping cost of $24) won’t get it to me until November. I’m excited to receive it.
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Secret-Life-of...
But are you trying to ship out of the UK? Amazon UK also says they will ship in October and not November.
Most people writing scientific literature are not English majors nor even great communicators, their primary competencies are elsewhere. Expecting everyone to write literature is just odd & reductive.
Yes, it helps to be a good writer, but the primary objective for science papers is to convey information; that it is well written or enjoyable is a nice bonus but not essential.
What's jarring about AI content is seeing the mastery of English applied in mundane contexts, where people are used to see more basic, pedestrian language.
(That, and overuse of patterns, which is more of an artifact of how people use LLMs - specifically that 90%+ of the AI output you see is the first response to the prompt in a fresh session. For AI, each time is the first time it's using this pattern, for user it's the 10th time they saw it within the span of an hour.)
Always enjoy reading the blog posts, and this seems like a great way to support work that gives me joy. Who knows, might start picking up actual electronics as side projects. Hardware work seems like such a great way to get code into the physical world.
I'm not sure who exactly this book is for, but it's certainly not for absolute beginners. There is a huge delta between the target audience and the level of understanding and experience someone not knowing a first thing about electronics would typically have.
I can clearly remember sitting there reading about component parasitics, without even having a clear idea how an ideal component behaves, and so on. I was just lacking buckets of context, and it was a painful read with lots of assumptions about the reader's background.
On the other hand, I still think it is a great book, like pretty much everything else from NoStarch. I just disagree on it being suitable as a first book in electronics.
That said, I'm looking forward to the day when I will be on an adequate enough level to read it again -- this time, in its entirety.
AlphaPhoenix YouTube channel is also a great source of information to clarify theoretical topics. I find it very helpful to just see how he think about electricity in his various projects: https://youtu.be/X_crwFuPht4. And his enthusiasm is contagious!
One personal note: as someone coming from software I find learning electronics pretty hard as it requires a completely different mental model and way to approach systems. Took me years of various failed attempts to finally internalize I have to stop relying on metaphors and shortcuts, and instead understand the actual physics at play to develop an intuition that makes sense. That looks daunting and I thought I would hate that part but in fact after pushing through the first weeks it becomes really satisfying! Accept things take time and that you will be uncomfortable for a while, and move at your own pace. And here LLMs are actually really helpful to clarify topics you’re not sure you understand fully, once you start to learn the terminology (I use instructions that makes it clear they shouldn’t solve things for me and instead evaluate my understanding)
1) Introduction to Embedded Systems: Using Microcontrollers and the MSP430 by Manuel Jiménez, Rogelio Palomera, Isidoro Couvertier - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4614-3143-5
This has more of a hardware interfacing slant than most books on embedded systems which is what a software person needs. Every topic is first introduced in a general way with lots of illustrations and then its application in MSP430 is shown. Hence we can easily transfer our understanding to any other MCU family. A really good textbook for serious students of embedded electronics.
As an EE, those statements sound so ridiculously reductive. It's like saying, "An oven is a cake-baker."
And it results in confusion for both EE students and non-EE hobbyists who aren't baking cakes - or who don't know about timers and temperature dials.
For transistors vs MOSFET I really liked https://youtu.be/DKYguNg1vmk as an overview
I went from electronics to software and one thing that has puzzled me is how much people dislike reading docs as in reference manuals. People can get by with sloppy code full of hidden bugs and when those bugs arise they’re like deers frozen by headlights.
Imagine building a circuit without any ideas how it operates. I’ve encountered web devs that don’t understand how http works.
A lot of electronic books struggle to find balance between super easy projects, very specific cookbook recipes or a laundry list of components.
Oh yes, these kinds of shortcuts have always worked great.
One of the real good shortcuts is to just start soldering parts together according to a plan in your head, without taking the time to make a schematic drawing beforehand or do any advanced calculations.
There might be more emphasis on the properties and ratings of each component this way, this is not something to skip over, you should be very familiar with each component you use. Well in advance, and loads of hours of component study needs to be behind you, otherwise you may not do too good at just whipping something up on the bench that's electrically sound to begin with.
As pointed out, with math it can be the same way.
If you just want to quickly start picking up parts and soldering them together right away without doing any advanced calculations, the best shortcut is to have already become quite familiar with the equations including calculus when necessary, so you can bring to bear endless hours of mathematical study and use it to intuitively guide your soldering iron for every hour at the bench.
Edit: upvoted because your message should not be less than neutral, not greyed out at all. Obviously, I'm on the fence, sometimes I use math, other times not at all ;)
That was a silly statement by the author; just say that this is "less theoretical" and not a textbook.
Looked at the contents/sample chapter and it seems just like many of the books published by make magazine.
Also see Sensors and Signal Conditioning by Ramon Pallas-Areny and John Webster for a theoretical combination treatment.
It's just a stylistic thing, same with the smoke, which represents heat more so than fumes.
Normally you hold the iron horizontal under the nose and of course don't breathe during the heat test.
And you don't actually kiss the soldering iron until it's cooled all the way down, and usually not unless the experimental circuit you came up with works the first time you plug it in :) So you can relax as intended and unplug the damn iron, without having to keep on hammering til all hours.
One thing she's not telling is the way you should be effective enough soldering using (very inexpensive) uncontrolled soldering irons, that you can eventually solder two pieces of solder together. Before you graduate to a "pro-grade" soldering station.
The wide margins remind me of university coursebooks.
What I want is a paperback where the margins are chosen such that you can read the text when you fold back the facing part of the book.
(Or is it praising with generous damnation?)
How about a triple-play, damning with damn damnation?
But since the author has already been hassled in vague terms, I'll add some objective specifics from a quick review of chapter 9:
* Type face imbalance: italics appear to be in a smaller font than the roman text AND italics appear to be rendered from a different baseline. * The text body is 90-characters wide (want <70 in a non columnar print layout) * hyphenated words -- yet still ragged right!!! * inadequate negative space around introduction -- combined with the imbalanced italics, the body text changes font size 3 times in the first three sentences. * in a bound work, margins should slightly alternate between even and odd pages to honor the origin of the binding
The italics is an unacceptable flaw in the main body font -- it's uncannily distracting -- when I first read it something felt off, but I couldn't put my finger on it. You could manually adjust the glyphs with a tool like font forge, but it would be easier to select a different font that the publisher has already licensed.
Typographers typically target a maximum line length of 66 characters. This number is an empirical sweet spot for human ergonomics and comprehension, but if you must exceed it, you want to accommodate by slightly increasing the leading (inter-line spacing.) If you're exceeding it to try and save paper, consider a columnar layout.
Ragged-right is an acceptable professional choice when lines are too short to sensibly justify them. But above 40 characters-per-line, you can reliably justify the text cleanly to both sides with hyphenation and stretching the inter-word spacing[1]. This rendering enables hyphenation (a compromise on comprehension) without realizing the benefit of this trade off!
The margins of a bound work should slightly alternate between left and right pages (not a requirement for a PDF.)
One positive note: the layout does appear to have widow and orphan management. And the chapter headings in a classy font.
Somewhat more subjectively, Subsection titles are aligned into the margin. The reasoning is likely "helps you scan to a subsection quickly" but if I were the editor I'd refer you to works [0] where the Chapter headings are to the left but the subsection headers are aligned with the text.
To the author: You write well and clearly enjoy the topic. You deserve a better layout editor than you had this round.
[0]: https://www.london.ac.uk/sites/default/files/study-guides/co... (page 1)
[1]: In this newsprint scan, narrower columns are left ragged-right, but columns with ~40 characters are justified: https://www.stanleypackaging.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/...
[2]: Analog Devices has some of the best type-set datasheets in the industry. You'll find 66-character columns, coherent letterface choices, adequate whitespace, and they do a great job of bending the rules to accommodate full-page tables. A great reference if you're also laying out both text and diagrams. https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data...
> I think you know better than to accuse me of hurting people
No, I actually really don't. You saw something and posted something that was clearly meant to hurt the person who created it, with absolutely no upside for anyone involved.
... and found nothing interesting
Adults will understand that the "shush" gesture with the soldering iron is supposed to be a play on the "secret" in the title, but a large part of the target audience is 12-15 years old. There will inevitably be some who'll imitate the picture, with painful results.
"IT'S AN EDUCATIONAL TOY."
"What if she cuts herself?"
"THAT WILL BE A PAINFUL LESSON."