

Electrical engineering - pencil

Hello HN,<p>Please suggest books which teaches all(fundamental) aspects of electrical engineering,books which teaches essential physics and math
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RiderOfGiraffes
How old are you? What do you already know? What is 2/3+4/7?

Do you know what an electron is? Do you know its charge? What does V=IR mean?

What is sqrt(-1)? What are the solutions of x^2-3x+2=0, and how did you find
them?

Without knowing things like this it's impossible to know whether to recommend
Horowitz and Hill, or something like this:
[http://www.makingthings.com/teleo/products/documentation/tel...](http://www.makingthings.com/teleo/products/documentation/teleo_user_guide/electronics.html)

Just try typing "Introduction to Electronics" into Google and see what you
get.

Finally, Why? What do you want to accomplish - where are you trying to get to?

~~~
pencil
well..i'am 25 years old and i'am very much eager to learn,i'am pretty good at
algebra but i've got no knowledge in physics nor the essential math needed to
learn physics and essential physics needed to learn electrical
engineering,i'am stuck

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Where are you, and what local resources do you have?

This sort of stuff is enormously difficult to learn from books and
unstructured on-line material. The problem, then, is that you need a properly
structured course, with exercises and tests to help regulate your progress.

As others have said, you'll need algebra and trig, then you'll need some
calculus. You need facility with word problems, and then some basic physics.

Here are some very, very simple basics to see where you are.

We can think of electricity as water flowing in a pipe. This analogy will get
you a long way, but you will have to keep in mind that it is an analogy, and
will sometimes be misleading. So ...

Loosely speaking, "Voltage" is the amount of "oomph" behind electrical
current, it's like pressure. The more voltage you have, the more current
you'll be able to push through a conductor.

However, a conductor will also resist the flow of current. In the simplest
case, the amount of resistance remains constant over a wide range of
conditions.

So, the formula is V=IR, (voltage drop across a resistor) is equal to (current
flowing through it) times (value of the resistor).

The unit of voltage is the "volt"

The unit of current is the "amp" (short for "ampere")

The unit of resistance is the ohm.

So, suppose you have a resistor of 1K ohms (1000 ohms) and you put 2V (2
volts) across it. How much current will flow?

Suppose from A to B I have a resistor of 5K, and from B to C I have a resistor
of 2K. If we have 5mA (5 milli-amps, 5/1000 amps) flowing from A to C, what is
the total voltage drop from A to C?

Showing how you answer these will help us to provide suitable recommendations.

Finally, is there a local library? Is there a local college/university? Are
you limited to on-line resources?

~~~
pencil
to be honest i 'am capable of solving the above problem without any dificulty
as they are pretty straight forward.to answer your question i don't have the
time to go to a university nor a local library as i need to work to feed my
family.but i can buy sufficient time to study on my own .anyways thanks a lot
for your advice ,if you have further recomendations i'll be really glad to
hear from you

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hga
Which books are right for you depends on what in particular you're interested
in, and what your level of aptitude for this area is. For a sequence of
topics, here's MIT's; I'm providing the course numbers, match those against
the on-line versions at the OCW site:
<http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm>

    
    
      18.01 Single Variable Calculus
       8.01 Classical Mechanics
      18.02 Multivariable Calculus
       8.02 Electricity and Magnetism
    
       6.002 Circuits and Electronics
       6.003 Signals and Systems
    

That will get you a long ways.

~~~
rikthevik
If I remember correctly, MIT doesn't distinguish between Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science, which helps to product EEs who can program
and CS majors who understand hardware.

~~~
rscott
I'd be shocked at this. I'd understand not differentiating EE and CompE, but
not CS.

~~~
hga
What's CompE?

Note, CS departments generally either came out of Math departments, in which
case they emphasize CS and not much in the way of EE, or they came out of EE
departments and strongly emphasize the EE side of things even if you're pure
CS. MIT is an example of the latter, I think the same is true for Berkeley and
Stanford, I'm not sure about CMU.

~~~
thegoleffect
CompE = Computer Engineering.

~~~
hga
Ah, I see.

MIT's EECS department was first just plain EE, so they rather naturally
combined the two as computers came of age (there was much less division
between the two in the '50s and early '60s).

As of the '80s, it had the opinion that "no MIT EECS graduate should be
completely at sea if he had to do some programming or had some weird
electrical problem to deal with" as I said in another reply to this thread.

There really aren't many if any EE disciplines today that have _no_
programming component. The reverse isn't so true, but a whole lot of
programmers/CS types will be faced with EE problems they should at least have
some understanding of. Plus the abstractions are hardly opaque; a minimal
understanding of EE will help a lot in understanding what's going on with the
beasts we program, where they're going, etc.

WRT to the former, at my 2001 job at Lucent we had the strangest transmission
line problem on a big PC board. It wasn't fully diagnosed until the lead EE
for it got _really_ desperate and put his scope probes at every point he
could, upon which he found the signal was messed up in middle of a line ...
but not at the end (which he had of course already checked).

I don't have to know too much EE to know I can't blame him for taking so long
to find it.

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wal5hy
Having finished a degree in Electronics I would recommend the following two
books:

* Engineering Maths by K. Stroud [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Engineering-Mathematics-6th-K-Stroud...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Engineering-Mathematics-6th-K-Stroud/dp/1403942463) to my mind there's no better maths book, very logical step by step approach to improving maths skills by building on previous knowledge

* The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hall [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz/dp/052...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz/dp/0521370957) this is often referred to as the bible of electronics and acts as a great reference book (there is a circuit chip designer in my workplace who came from a physics background and taught himself electronics with this book)

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RiderOfGiraffes
Horowitz and Hill, not Hall. It is a superb reference book, agreed, but it's
not a good book to learn from, especially if you don't have the basics.

~~~
wal5hy
ah can't correct the spelling mistake now, thanks for spotting it.

A video I saw on a few years ago which was great for getting a fast paced
over-view of how starting with digital electronics one can build a computer
and write a program to work on it "From NAND to Tetris in 12 steps"
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7654043762021156507>

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jimmyjim
A few gratis books I can recommend:
<http://openbookproject.net//electricCircuits/>

They're the best that I have ever found. (It is a very sweet irony that they
happen to be free).

edit: be sure to download the pdf versions. E.g. here's a link for book I, DC:
<http://openbookproject.net//electricCircuits/DC/DC.pdf> (6 MB)

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bavcyc
If you have a local community college, they should offer math courses that
will teach what you need to know at a reasonable price. I'm not sure I would
recommend any text to learn math on your own.

Mathematical Modeling of Physical Networks has an interesting approach to
teaching Electrical Engineering. Not sure how it would work for someone new to
EE.

ARRL might have some good sources of information. The ARRL Handbook is a good
reference.

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RiderOfGiraffes
I can recommend this site: <http://www.khanacademy.org/>

I suggest you find a video there that you're interested in and that you can't
quite understand, then come back and ask a question. You said you were OK with
algebra, so pre-calculus would be a good place to start.

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francoisdevlin
Halliday & Resnick is still a great introduction to Physics, and it will be
for quite some time.

