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Book Reviews

I'll chime in here. I mentioned it in my profile post but I am a big Forrest M. Mims fan. The closest I ever got to a celebrity contact was a personal response to an email I sent him. All his books are great if you can still find them.

More recently I think the Simon Monk "Evil Genus" books are of Mims quality--in terms of explanation, circuit design, and background theory. I enjoy pulling put a calculator and a quad ruled pad and working through examples in his circuits. Great fun.

Yeah, I'm a geek.
 
A well written book, easy to follow, algebra and trigonometry based for the novice electronic student. I really like it, it also comes with a simulation software.

Title of the Book:

Principles of electronic circuits 7th edition

by Thomas L. Floyd

principles of electronic circuits floyd 7th edition.jpg
 
The biggest gripe I have is in books such as Art of Electronics and others, is the standard use of symbols is not observed, in particular one that can have a dangerous outcome if miss-interpreted is the wide spread use of the Earth ground symbol for circuit common in general.:(
M.
 
No doubt some book titles have already been mentioned during the time-frame of creating my Excel>PDF list.
As the list is quite long, and contains several columns of data, it was decided to use the spreadsheet-to-PDF format rather than miles of text rows.
Hopefully the PDF is displayable on the forum...
 

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Visual Basic For Engineers.
Copied all 400 pages of this book years ago from a public reference library, it (obviously) no longer has the CD-Rom referenced in the book's text, but very useful equations with explanatory sketches, covering a wide range of engineering applications.
These include wave-guide efficiency and design, fin-efficiency (for heat-sinks), various antenna designs and parameters, printed circuit design considerations (capacitance / mutual inductance etc), and many more.
The equations themselves are mostly embedded within the VB code script, so requires a "Basic:rolleyes:" working knowledge of the code to decrypt back to the original equation.
..... Still working on it ..... :D
 
MY BAD!!
Sorry, I should have titled the book in my post #50 VISICALC For Engineers, not Visual Basic.
Visicalc was the first spread-sheet program for computers (c. 1977-1978).
Which means the 'disc' mentioned in the book was probably a floppy.
There are (or were) downloads available of the Visicalc compiler.
IDK whether these still work on modern PC OS's.
I tried Excel directly, but many operators and functions, don't.
 
MY BAD!!
Sorry, I should have titled the book in my post #50 VISICALC For Engineers, not Visual Basic.
Visicalc was the first spread-sheet program for computers (c. 1977-1978).
Which means the 'disc' mentioned in the book was probably a floppy.
There are (or were) downloads available of the Visicalc compiler.
IDK whether these still work on modern PC OS's.
I tried Excel directly, but many operators and functions, don't.

Oh man, did you ever date yourself with that post. AND made me nostalgic at the same time. Thanks.
 
As a total newbie, but letting the magic smoke escape a lot less now, I needed to find books to teach myself the rudiments of electronics, and stumbled upon this site.
All the books are in the public domain and freely available, no illegal torrent downloads here. I just put 'electronics' in the search and got this as a return.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=electronics
The earliest book available from that list is "Electricity, magnetism and chemistry" from 1840, so it's an extensive library in multiple languages.
Let us know if you find anything of interest.
Almost forgot, they have plenty of old hobby electronics magazines as well, which ar fascinating and show the evolution of the hobby
 

bertus

Moderator
Just another vote for the Horowitz Hill Art of Electronics.
However, my grateful thanks have to go to the authors of the many application notes written by Texas, Ferranti, Mullard, Siemans and others, way back in the 60's who first published all the standard circuits we happily use nowadays. I would also acknowledge Wireless World and Practical Wireless periodicals of 60's and 70's for most of my education.
Not really what this string was set up for but if you are interested in historical electronics resources and journals there is a web site which has a large number of radio and electronics publications scanned in. A sterling job being done. If you have been around electronics for a long long time it might be of interest. Apologies if it has already been mentioned in this forum -- but here it is again!
https://worldradiohistory.com/index.htm
 
Principles and Applications of Electrical Engineering, Giorgio Rizzoni. 2004, 4th Ed., International Edition (whatever that means) There are later editions.
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A massive book ( 20 x 25cm, 1022 pg ! ) covering such a lot, from fundamentals of electrical calculations through to electronic components and circuits and a lot of the associated maths, -- a Tour de Force. This book is pretty much the opposite to Horowitz and Hill, The Art of Electronics, already mentioned several time in this string, being more a traditional course reader useful in studying for a degree and preparing for the exams, containing worked problem calculation examples. It is not really a practical book for the work bench and real life. Though I would imagine it could be useful in establishing a broad systems concept before turning to Horowitz and Hill for the practical realisation.

Prices for new, ranging from £40 to £140 (!) on the interweb, I have to admit I bought mine brand new for £8 off a market stall. Great cover! Looks very posh in my bookshelf. (Possibly a remainder or a duff print run with errors though?) Probably best a book for the college library.

The book came with a CD containing a lot of stuff I haven't looked at fully yet. Data sheets and software component models for simulation program of some sort.

Happy reading.
 
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52 Projects using IC741 BP24, Rudi &Uwe Redmer, Babani press,
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I find it amazing that the 741 op is still being sold and used, having been designed and built 52 years ago. -- I have just had to pause to catch my breath!
There are a number of books like 52 Projects, but I think this very cheap (or even free if you know where to look) book from way back 1975, is as good as any to my mind. It contains, as it says, 52 LM741 circuits that would be simple to build and play with and is thus a very good primer to learn about op-amps, although no PCB or prototyping board layouts are included, just the circuit diagrams.
The 741 op am is ideal to learn with, being cheap (40p), but also demonstrating many poor characteristics such as input offsets, noise, limited bandwidth, thermal drift etc., which serve to demonstrate the problems to be taken into consideration when designing with more modern op-amps and critical applications.
I only hesitate to recommend it for complete beginners because of its lack of circuit layouts, but it certainly has a lot to offer for them.
 
Adventures with Electronics - Tom Duncan ISBN 0 7195 3566 2
published 1978
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Tom Duncan is a very well known writer of school science and technology books in the UK, through the 70's 80's and 90's and I think this book is an excellent example of his work. The book is intended as a self guided course in transistor electronics and to my mind is one of the clearest introductions to using transistors. There are 16 different projects, using up to 3 transistors with clear circuit diagrams and physical layouts using proto-boards, with accompanying relevant and simple theory.

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I can happily recommend this book for any 10 to 15 year old or more, who wants to get an insight into transistor electronics. £2 or so for a second hand copy and £10 to £15 for the bits and you have an excellent educational kit.
 
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