Technical book club
March 8th, 2012I have a new job (in Oxford – more details in a later post) and as part of it I’m going to be doing a lot more board-level electronics than I have been before. I ought to brush up my skills and keep current, and so as a step towards that I’m going to start reading more technical books.
I have several problems with electronics books:
- they are expensive – £50 is a typical price
- they are rarely stocked in real bookshops, so online purchase is nearly always necessary
- a lot of them are rubbish – either they’re very maths-based with very little application, or they’re badly written, or out of date.
So, I have a plan. I will buy one new technical book a month (which I can afford), based on reviews and online previews. I read it during the month, write a brief review on this blog (and on the bookseller’s website) and if it’s no good, send it back for a refund or resale. March’s book will be Analog Circuits by Robert Pease.
March 8th, 2012 at 4:21 pm
Might not suit yuo, but might interest your readers: there is an open MIT course at https://6002x.mitx.mit.edu
March 8th, 2012 at 9:34 pm
It’s utterly brilliant!
Yours sincerely,
R. Pease.
March 9th, 2012 at 12:31 am
I don’t know about electronic books, but lots of computer books are now available electronically, either to buy (e.g. from O’Reilly) or from a free digital library (e.g. BCS/ACM). I assume that you’re a member of the IET: do they offer anything similar?
March 9th, 2012 at 10:12 am
John K: you’re right – buried in the depths of the IET’s fiendish library website are full-text HTML versions of several of the books I was intending to buy. I think I’ll browse them online and then decide whether I want the hard copies.
John W: I have one thing to say, and it’s “J R Hartley”…
March 9th, 2012 at 2:29 pm
Try the IEEE’s Electronics Handbook.
Really good – but you wouldn’t want to drop it on your foot.
March 9th, 2012 at 2:34 pm
Cy: got a link, or an ISBN? I can’t find a book in print with that title.
March 13th, 2012 at 9:26 pm
I can second the mitx course, for a ground up brush up on things. I’m not doing my self, too much other life going on however a few colleagues are doing it and so the material is floating round the office and it looks really good. There is stuff that can be learned from it, even when you have been hitting the FR4 for 8 years or more. One of our most senior electronics engineers is doing it out of curiosity and keeps discovering things he had forgotten.