General > General Technical Chat

New Engineer; Book Reccomendations?

(1/2) > >>

MuhScopeBroke:
Hello all,

I'm a few months into my first big boy EE job and the boss says I can use the company to bankroll any books I want to learn from. I wanted to ask from the best and wisest, what solid EE books are out there? (I already own "The Art of Electronics"  ;) ) 

If it helps, I am interested in hardware design, robotics, systems engineering, and device miniaturization.

Thanks!

ebastler:
What field will you be working in?

aeberbach:
"Code: The Hidden Language of Hardware and Software: Second Edition" by Charles Petzold. It's a very well-written journey going from signalling with a single bit of information (like a light) to making functional blocks that combine to form a computer. If you wanted to you could follow along and build a machine out of relays, or anything that can do binary.

IanB:
Definitely look at online training resources like Pluralsight. I don't know if they have any hardware relevant training modules, but there might be other resources that do.

I have not bought a book in a long time, because information changes so fast that online information is always more current.

If you do buy books, choose books that deal with fundamental principles that remain the same, rather than on specific technologies that get out of date.

Infraviolet:
"choose books that deal with fundamental principles that remain the same"
Yes, but be careful not to get books that are too academic. Many textbooks exist which will show you how to derive all the theory, but then dedicate almost no space to applying it. One wonders if that sort of book was written simply to show people how to pass their degrees (because the exams always feature the derivations), the same way that earlier stages in education have seen learning-to-understand replaced with learning-exactly-what-will-be-in-the-exam. Horowitz and Hill is excellent in this regard, a book which actually talks about example circuits and their use, not just page on page of unapplied theory going in to ever greater detail on derivations of equations for ever more rare phenomena.

Also far too common are books which describe themselves as an overview of a field, but inside simply have a bunch of unrelated chapters by different experts all talking about very narrow sub-fields of the field. And types of books which seem to be written for "managers", they'll tell you hat the name of something is, and how to talk about it, but nothing about what it really is and how to use it. This sort of book is often filled with sections ending in "... is worthy of further study" or "experts on ... should be consulted before proceeding".

I'm not sure whether books as good as Horowitz and Hill exist for other fields, I'd like to know of them too if people can name them.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod