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by denotational 16 days ago
> the usual garbage undergrad textbooks

Out of interest, please could you give some examples of textbooks you consider garbage, and some you consider not to be (undergrad or otherwise)?

1 comments

Garbage -> Sedra and Smith particularly - hate it, anything which kicks you in the nuts right up front with Laplace and networks abstractions, anything from Pearson - have never seen a good one.

Good -> Razavi (Fundamentals of Microelectronics), Art of Electronics, most Jim Williams stuff (AN's and articles), Bowick RF Circuit design. They're actually useful.

I find Sedra/Smith a terrible introduction, but a good reference. It's nice once you've already built an intuition for how things work to be able to go back & build up the mathematical models, but trying to understand the behavior of circuits from the math first is a bad order.
I don't know, I found Sedra/Smith to be an excellent introduction.

But personally I think the whole Sedra/Smith vs Razavi argument is basically vi vs emacs for EEs.

What do you think about the author's upcoming book ("The Secret Life of Circuits")[0], for someone who is just starting out with electronics?

[0]: https://nostarch.com/secret-life-of-circuits

Just had a quick scan through it. ToC is a bit rambling. Content sample isn't enough to judge the whole book. I'll reserve judgement. It looks considerably better than Practical Electronics for Inventors and several orders of magnitude better than Mimms' and Make garbage.

Probably a good start. We shall see.

I was going to write my own book on the matter but quite frankly I don't have the time or energy for it.

Agreed on Sedra and Smith vs Razavi. Razavi uploaded lectures to YouTube that helped me a ton at the time.
> Art of Electronics

I would never recommend AoE to pretty much anybody nowadays. The problem is that AoE happily presents circuits you should almost never use right next to circuits you should almost always use with no indications distinguishing the two.