The Art of Electronics

The Art of Electronics is the first book of it's kind; Had I had this book starting out, it would have made my life a lot easier. This book's biggest asset is the approach of teaching electronics theory not from the physics and mathematical ground up, but from the practical and useful theory down. It filled in a serious gap in my understanding of electronics after graduating from University; I could analyse and design to specifications, but often did not understand why circuits were done in a particular manner.

Would this book have had the same impact had I not have had the exposure to theory beforehand? Horowitz & Hill do a good job of starting off at the very basics and working up, but several of the examples given in the text are more clearly understood with the ability to rigoursly analyse them mathematically.

The wild success of this book speaks for itself. If you are working with embedded systems or are curious about how they work, you need this text.

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The C Programming Language

When I started out with microcontrollers, and commercial 8-bit computer systems, assembly was your only choice if you wanted to do serious work with the machine. The biggest revolution in the 8-bit world has been the availability of decent, low-cost or open C compilers. With a good understanding of C and your micro's architecture, it's possible to do in a matter of minutes what would have taken hours in ground-up assembly.

The biggest example of this is the Atmel AVR and the AVR-GCC distribution. Based off it's open-source GPL licensed parent, GCC, the avr-gcc distribution provides the embedded community with a high quality, open, and freely available C compiler.

What does that have to do with anything? Well, armed with this book and a the ability to program, you don't need anything else. Everything you need to know about C syntax, pointers, IO, and structure can be found presented in a very clear, concise, and compact form that has not been duplicated since. I have at least two dozen programming language books in my library, and none comes close to conveying their content with the ease of K&R.

A word of warning; if you have never programmed before, this book will not help you become a programmer. How do you become a programmer? By writing programs! What this book will do, however, is help you become proficient in C, and a set of exercises that will help you on your way.

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Microelectronic Circuits

This book was used as the primary text in four courses I took in University, and those four courses only scratched the surface of what's inside. Sedra & Smith do a very robust, mathematically oriented analysis of the how and why of modern semiconductor devices. It's an easy book to pick up and read, but very little time is spent on practical circuits or application information.

Not much is missed; the book starts with a small review and quickly moves into the basics of semiconductor devices; diodes, BJTs, and MOSFETs. From there, detailed analysis is done on the building blocks of more complicated devices - amplifier configurations, op-amp devices, and into the physics behind their design and construction.

Emphasis on the theory and mathematics behind modern microelectronic devices means that to get the most out of this text, you need to work through the problems and examples provided. This is the book's biggest strength in an academic environment and it's biggest weakness as a self-learning book.

I highly recommend S&S as a companion text to "The Art of Electronics". They compliment each other very nicely.

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