(Part 2) Best electronics books according to redditors
We found 182 Reddit comments discussing the best electronics books. We ranked the 111 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
With a lot of modern algorithms printed in published books, you'd have to actually ban those too.
No problem, glad it was helpful! This book seems like what you're looking for, but it's a bit pricey. Right the First Time is another great resource, and volume 1 is available as a free .pdf online somewhere (and some HDI and flex circuit books, but that's a bit less relevant. Got them all at the same site when I downloaded them).
Your opinion is wrong. None of these references show any evidence whatsoever that cold fusion is a real phenomenon. Here are some references for where you can read about real nuclear physics:
A third option might be to get this one used. It provides a good amount of design examples which are always helpful. Plus its cheap.
http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Electronics-Electrical-Computer-Engineering/dp/0195117018/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1453689790&sr=8-2&keywords=elements+of+power+electronics
Also coursera offers a power electronics course by UC boulder (Erickson) which you may want to look into. I know the other ones were free, but I don't know how these new specializations on coursera work
https://www.coursera.org/learn/power-electronics
Some people already answered this, but I wanted to add some info on magnets.
Magnets are pretty nifty, let me see if I can help out with some of this. The type of magnet you have on your refrigerator is a ferromagnet. Its polar opposite is nicely named an antiferromagnet. These materials can also take on different forms, if you heat up a ferromagnet higher than its curie temperature, it becomes paramagnetic. If you heat an antiferromagnet up past its neel (nay-el) temperature it becomes diamagnetic.
So what does this mean at an atomistic level?
Electrons have spins that can be polarized in different directions. When you get a group of electrons to all spin in the same direction they create a magnetic field. A magnetic material has a majority of its electrons spinning in the same direction.
With ferromagnets, you can align the electrons by subjecting it to a magnetic field. The electrons will start spinning the same way and form large domains aligned with the induced magnetic field. When you pull the material out of the field, the magnetic effect will persist, because changing spin means breaking a domain wall, which costs energy.
Paramagnets will align when in a magnetic field, but once you take it out they will go back to their chaotic spin states, a paramagnetic material has enough energy to not care about breaking domain walls.
Antiferromagnetic materials have a net magnetization of zero, so for every up spinning electron there's a down spinning electron.
Diamagnets are much like paramagnets, only they don't like magnetic fields entering them. (They have a negative magnetic susceptibility)
Then there are some others, like ferrimagnets, which have electrons spinning in opposing directions, however one of the directions is much more prominent, therefore they act like weak ferromagnets.
If you want a really good book on magnets, check out Nicola Spaldin's book. It's not too physics intensive.
I did want to correct a post someone made earlier though, magnetics are based off of the electronic structure, not the atomic one. You can have single crystal diamagnets, and you can have polycrystalline ferromagnets. The grain structure is not the main contributing factor to magnetism.
Where/how you figure this out?
By 1) getting into semiconductor processing and process design, 2) getting into device modeling, and 3) becoming an analog IC designer - and, of course, working in the semiconductor industry. In school you focus on upper division and graduate classes in these areas.
Generally you need all three to understand this area well. That's kind of how I fell into it. Leading edge analog design quickly becomes limited by the specifics of your simulation models and your specific process implementation. Usually parameters of process and device become factor in your analog circuit design and you may even adjust physical CAD layout to tweak them.
This is where SPICE models come in. Basically you keep getting new ones added to CAD systems over the last 40 years because of some corner that isn't well modeled. The simplest models (like MOS 1->3 and Gummel-Poon) worked OK for very large devices 40 years ago when SPICE was invented but process shrinks have created lots of nonidealities since (which is the nonideality? the device or the model? :-) ). Nature of the beast.
The simple fact however is that you can never get a device model to actually cover all corners of operation equally well. Such a model doesn't exist and probably never will.
Instead the reality is that you generally need fairly peaked experts extracting parameters and often even creating new models with the caveat that you always have to compromised on the model extraction accuracy to fit the particular application corner you are designing to.
So, for example, if are doing high power, you'll optimize one of the standard models for that corner and sacrifice low power accuracy or vice versa. If you are doing RF/uW devices, you make a different set of compromises than you would if you were doing digital or LF linear. In 40 years it's never become turn-key and automated - the degrees of freedom in the models generally don't properly match those of reality. Too many or too few cause problems with the extraction.
There are other areas related to SPICE model extraction that are very similar with just a small change of emphasis.
These include parametric process measurement which monitors each fabrication step using end-of-line analog testing of specialized test structures. This is more focused with manufacturing process control and device operational integrity "out the door". A side area to this is reliability testing - when with the devices fail in the field (and they will fail). Bread and butter to me. Been doing stuff in this general area for most of my career.
Some books on my shelf are the following (they are so common they are usually referred to by the author's name):
Physics of Semiconductor Devices (Sze)
MOS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) Physics and Technology (Nicollian/Brews)
Semiconductor Device Modeling with Spice (Kielkowski)
SPICE: Practical Device Modeling (Antognetti)
Semiconductor Material and Device Characterization (Schroder)
Failure Mechanisms in Semiconductor Devices (Amerasekera/Najm)
Failure Modes And Mechanisms In Electronic Packages (Singh/Viswanadham)
You can also hang out at /r/chipdesign which is probably the closest subreddit to this area. I'm a moderator there.
I can only reference engineering textbooks in Russian, it's probably not what you want. It's a domain-specific knowledge, but you can try something like this book.
Good one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1118217322/ref=pd_aw_sim_14_3?ie=UTF8&dpID=51IWYVdNC5L&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL115_SR91%2C115_&refRID=0Y684DHZCYDQGWXJ23BK
Requires multimeters a scope and signal generator
Multisim is great - there are free online circuit simulators too which can be useful for the basics, I think also read somewhere that kicad (also free) is introducing a circuit simulator in its next major release.
Edit: I also recommend this book for beginners.
There are a lot of good suggestions in here, but I'm wondering if any of them are really applicable to what you want to do. An electrodynamics book like Griffiths will come at magnetism from the perspective of field and/or tensor mathematics. A solid state book like Kittel or Ashcroft and Mermin would come at it starting from a phenomenological perspective and moving into things like local moments and band structure. I'm guessing here, but it seems like what you want is more of an idea of the interaction of magnetism and materials or observable phenomena. Either of those approaches would get you there, but it wouldn't be the most direct approach and it would be a lot more work than you need to put in if that's all you want. They would also both require a lot more math than it seems like you're really comfortable with, and both topics are complex enough that physics/chemistry/MSE students struggle with them without good instructors (and sometimes even with them).
Instead of starting with any of those, I'd suggest you look at some lower level, phenomenology and observation based works. Nicola Spaldin's Magnetic Materials: Fundamentals and Applications might be a good place to start. It's pretty low level: I think a motivated undergrad could deal with it after taking a year of freshman physics, but I think that's what you want, at least to start with. It gives a good overview of different kinds of magnetism and the different kinds of magnetic materials, as well as field generation and detection.
Incidentally, if you decide to be a masochist and go with a solid state book, I think Ashcroft & Mermin is a better text than Kittel. Kittel spent 50 years and eight editions trying to fit the new developments in the field into the book without making it significantly thicker, so Ashcroft has a narrower scope but covers what it does have in more depth. I find the writing style clearer and more accessible as well.
I would recommend Neil Storeys A Systems Approach.
This book is very well described, and was practically the baseline reference for all modules across first year digital and analog electronic modules, and some second year (BJTs, MOSFETs, FETs, Darlingtons, transconductance etc.)
(Un)fortunately to understand means a lot of reading, maths and experiments. Electronics is a practical subject and is the best way to learn. I would personally choose a DIY circuit, then read on the components, and their configurations i.e. RC, DC Couplers, potential dividers, negative feedback amps etc.
I am a huge fan of Electronics: A Systems Approach by Neil Storey. It has chapters on a wide range of subjects, with very practical and useful information, applicable to both analog and digital systems but also general principles of engineering. It was a 'must have' book to have during my EE studies according to my teachers and I must say they weren't wrong, I must have opened it atleast once for every course I followed.
It's not too expensive: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Electronics-Approach-Dr-Neil-Storey/dp/0273719181
You have no idea what you are talking about. Unless you have a degree in optoelectronics or nanooptics and have done any of the equations that matter, that take this difference into account, your argument is completely useless and naive. I recommend this book (or one of the newer editions): https://www.amazon.com/Optoelectronics-Photonics-Principles-Safa-Kasap/dp/0201610876
Buy a copy of the Yamaha Sound Reinforcement Handbook. It is one of the best books that I know of for learning the fundamentals of how sound works. Even though I only volunteered at a church for a few years, I wound up purchasing one for myself, and too this day I refer to it when I am confused about receiver specs, speaker impedance, or any other audio issues I have.
SS: Toshimasa Yamazaki's research is in brain-computer interfaces, using an EEG cap connected to a computer. These words and seasons are recovered from only electrical brain activity, even when a subject does not speak aloud. The Wikipedia article on brain-reading cites Yamazaki's vowel reading paper in Japanese. When combined with a remote EEG means, all typed passwords could be compromised.
Here are some which can give you a good start
http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Astrophysics-Undergraduate-Lecture-Physics/dp/3642359620
http://www.amazon.com/Observational-Astrophysics-Astronomy-Library/dp/3642218148
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Astrophysics-Gravity-Stellar-Undergraduate/dp/1461492351/
These people trained the network using a human pilot: http://www.araa.asn.au/acra/acra2000/papers/paper12.pdf
Andrew Ng did the same thing, but also built their own simulation software: http://cs.stanford.edu/groups/helicopter/papers/iser04-invertedflight.pdf
These folks used Simulink + FlightGear: http://www.academia.edu/1784377/Real-time_hardware_simulation_of_a_small-scale_helicopter_dynamics
More about using Simulink for quad-copters: http://www.amazon.com/Modeling-Neural-Control-Quadrotor-Helicopter/dp/3838392981
More about testing UAV techniques (Kalman filters) via FlightGear: http://tom.pycke.be/mav/91/testing-kalman-filters
http://julian.togelius.com/DeNardi2006Evolution.pdf
Tutorial on interface with FlightGear: https://linkslink.wordpress.com/takeoff/
There's also http://sourceforge.net/projects/crrcsim/
I think you'll be able to find these things yourself if you do some more due-diligence searching.
i'm guess you mean this RF book.
Instrumentation/process control/flow engineer... I really do not know what we are called on all levels its very multi discipline.
http://www.amazon.com/Instrument-Engineers-Handbook-Third-Edition/dp/0801982421
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0849310830/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_2?pf_rd_p=1944687622&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0801982421&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0KHGRBBP35EWXQDHB34W
There is a lot of instrument and process information in these books..
http://www.amazon.com/Right-First-Time-Practical-Handbook/dp/0974193607/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1317652859&sr=8-6
This is an excellent book that a company I used to work for owned.
I am using this book, but it is a different version as I bought it on sale a year or two ago. I never found time to begin it until I finished school, but now it's great to learn a new science!
Ahh, then perhaps try another book (or wikipedia, which tends to have good explanations). I can recommend:
Hu - Modern Semiconductor Devices for Integrated Circuits
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~hu/Book-Chapters-and-Lecture-Slides-download.html
Sze - Physics of Semiconductor Devices
http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Semiconductor-Devices-Simon-Sze/dp/0471143235
Kasap - Principles of Electronic Materials and Devices
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Electronic-Materials-Devices-Kasap/dp/0073104647/
Neamen - An Introduction to Semiconductor Devices
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Semiconductor-Devices-Donald-Neamen/dp/0072987561/
And for entertainment value, Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics:
http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm
If these aren't available in your library, you can find perfectly good older editions at abebooks.com for less than $20 with shipping.
The semiconductor will always be at equilibrium ( n*p = n_i) unless acted on by an external energy source, such as a bias voltage or light source. No external source = equilibrium.
During my engineering degree I studied semiconductors extensively. The two books I would recommend to you are Pierret for device fundamentals, and I think this is what I used for device fab. Since your lab does optoelectronics, I'll also recommend Kasap. These are all very much engineering oriented, so they are good if you're looking for a functional understanding of how these devices work.
Also, some of the solid state physics (learning about density of states, electronic structure, etc.) is probably better learned from Mermin and Ashcroft.
It sounds like you are actually talking about power electronics. Power ellectronics are the power conversions outside the motors that control the motor and motor/drives is more the magnetics of the drive.
I just finished a class on power electronics last semester and we used [this book](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0195117018/ref=mp_s_a_1_14
?qid=1452095997&sr=8-14&pi=AC_SX110_SY165_QL70&keywords=power+electronics)
If you really want I can send you all of the lecture notes too. I'll update later with the motor drives book we will be using. I also have an electronic version of the power electronics book.
The Feynman lectures are really good, and they will take you from basic physics to quantum mechanics.
Get yourself a good groundwork in physics before you worry about flashy things like relativity. The ability to spout out fancy words about fancy-sounding fields really means nothing if you don't actually understand what you are talking about.
Now, this said, once you are ready to dive into quantum mechanics, I'd personally recommend Griffiths.
As a chemical engineer specialized in electron microscopy, I am partial to solid-state physics and physics at the atomic scale, so if you are interested in such small things, I would recommend Callister as an introductory book (it is basically the bible of materials science, and is an excellent beginner book and reference) and Kasap as a very readable book on solid-state physics.
With any such books, unless you are using the book for a class and it is required that you have a particular version, don't worry about getting the newest edition. An older edition will generally save you a lot of money if you purchase a hard copy. That said, it is easy enough to find most of them digitally if you are so inclined.
For a very basic but thoroughly entertaining introduction: There are no Electrons: Electronics for Earthlings.
Also: Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics.