
The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition, to be released April 2015 - jotux
http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/physics/electronics-physicists/art-electronics-3rd-edition
======
analog31
I learned from the 1st edition, back in 1983, when I took the electronics
course for physics majors. I think it's the best textbook I've ever used, in
any subject. I fell in love with analog electronics. Note my HN user name. ;-)

What's happened with analog since then? I believe that opto-electronics is
much more important today, as are switchmode circuits. Some things, like
systematic noise budgeting, will never go away, even if we have to learn the
behaviors of some new devices. Also, it's probably harder to get away with
having just a limited understanding of high speed circuits and transmission
lines today. But something I like about analog electronics is that physics
will always be physics.

If you liked H&H, you might also like: Building Electro-Optical Systems:
Making It all Work, by Phil Hobbs.

~~~
aswanson
What happened? Digital and moore's law took over. The microprocessor continues
to absorb every function that, at one point, made economical sense to do in
the analog domain. I share your lament, but reality instructs us to condition
signals and supply voltage properly, and let the micro take it from there.
It's only going to become more true as time moves on, so learn programming.
Get very good at it.

~~~
analog31
Upvoted. I definitely agree that many erstwhile "analog" functions have joined
the dark side. ;-) And I've been programming digital / analog systems since
the early 80s.

But I think that two challenges / opportunities remain for analog. The first
is that advances in digital capabilities place new demands on analog. For
instance, the possibility of higher sampling rates and bit depths requires us
to go back and update transducer preamps.

Second, some archaic skills can still be lucrative if the number of
practitioners decreases faster than the number of remaining applications. I'm
still betting my career on the need for _somebody_ to care about physics,
while also knowing how to program. At my workplace, I am possibly the last
remaining person who knows how to compute a noise budget that includes
transducers, analog signals, and digital processing, in an instrumentation
system.

Horowitz and Hill had a chapter, "Digital Meets Analog" that discuss ways that
digital designers have to keep up with analog concepts. The ways that digital
systems can go wrong are often analog.

~~~
sravfeyn
Really curious what your job is?

~~~
analog31
I work for a company that makes instrumentation. It's one of those "okay, now
what am I going to do with a physics degree" kinds of things, but it suits me
well. And I've bounced in and out of management. Today, there are engineers
who are ahead of me in electronic design, but I'm good at figuring out the
grand overview of how products work, and like to solve weird problems. Much of
my programming is in the service of solving problems, rather than creating
products.

------
Animats
See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Electronics#Third_e...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Electronics#Third_edition)
for all the pre-announcements since 2006. This isn't the first announcement.
Back in 2009 or so Amazon was taking pre-orders.

It really is an excellent book. It was written as a guide for grad students
who need to build instrumentation. A 25 year old book on electronic design
that talks about specific IC part numbers in detail is way out of date,
though. The approach used needs a refresh every five years or so.

It's less necessary than it used to be. We have so many on-line resources for
building electronics now.

~~~
aceperry
Interestingly, a lot of the parts discussed are still in wide use today. Much
of the concepts are necessary for understanding circuits and how they work.

~~~
markrages
Some of the parts discussed are probably in wide use _because_ they are
mentioned in AoE. The uA741 effect.

~~~
jschwartzi
That was basically the only opamp we were allowed to use in my undergraduate
electronics for Physicists classes.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It's a terrible opamp for precision measurement. (Actually it's a terrible
opamp for most things, except maybe student experiments.)

I have mixed feelings about AofA.

On the one hand it's funny and a good broad introduction to a lot of relevant
concepts.

On the other it glosses over so much of the math you need to learn to be
competent at design that it doesn't teach you nearly as much as it seems to.

When I first read it as an electronic engineering undergrad I thought this was
a very good thing, especially compared to the standard textbooks that buried
you in equations.

A few decades later I'm not so convinced. I think a good upgrade would be a
series of much bigger books (or Wiki pages?) that keep the breezy hands-on
style but also dig fearlessly into the details.

~~~
jeffwass
But it's an intro book. No single text can cover the introduction for the
range com people with no background to people designing cutting edge
circuitry. At some point you need a BS or MS in EE of course, but at this
point you're out of the realm of AoE.

I heard one guy who I used to work with criticize AoE for having an
'incorrect' circuit (I think it was some kind of differential amp). It turns
out that this guy had a MS in EE, and was designing a low-noise amplifier to
work in GHz range and complaining that the AoE circuit diagram, which was only
meant probably up to a few MHz tops, didn't account for some source of
thermodynamic noise from the silicon transistors. Or something like that, long
ago. Point is, if you're at that level of expertise you should not be using an
intro book. The fact this guy even thought to use AoE speaks volumes of just
how useful it really is.

------
kabdib
I'm making my way through the 2nd edition now. As a software guy who
occasionally writes close-to-the-metal firmware, I wish I'd read the book a
lot earlier.

It's fun to wire up a few transistors and other components and see them behave
the way your calculations said they would.

It's also fun to be talking to hardware engineers about firmware, and then
drop into a discussion about the circuit at hand. Sometimes it makes their
eyes bug out. :-) Sometimes you can even save money by suggesting a different
approach that software can make better use of.

------
jotux
For the uninitiated this is considered, by many, to be the electronics bible.
Sort of a TAOCP for electronics and circuits. The last version came out in
1989 and we're finally getting an update this year.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
> Sort of a TAOCP for electronics and circuits.

Except people actually read The Art of Electronics :)

------
spiritplumber
The smartest man I know gave me his copy, signed by Horowitz, and told me
"Figure this out, and you're a double E". Four years and a half later, I was
able to return it upon graduation. (Yeah, I took an extra semester...)

On a tiny shelf behind his tiny desk in his huge lab were a bible and a copy
of AoE.

------
ChuckMcM
Well there is another $120 pre-allocated :-).

I hope they make an electronic version, although I would be OK with buying a
second copy and getting it scanned if they don't.

~~~
bronson
Me too. All the engineering books I use week-to-week are PDFs in a directory
on my computer. The dead tree versions (including AoE) sit on the shelf
unused.

Make sure to click the "I want this title to be available as an ebook" link on
that page.

~~~
kefka
And my jaded self would think the digital copy would be some DRM pile of crap.

I've dealt with "school books-but online" before. I've seen things like 'book
explodes after 180 days combined with 'can only print 10 pages'.

I'll scan it myself or download it from someone who has. I'm just done with
DRM. Never again.

~~~
bronson
Agree 100%, none of my engineering ebooks are DRMed. For some of them, I
bought the text and then immediately pirated it off thepiratebay (rip) with a
clear conscience.

Seriously, screw DRM.

------
marai2
Can someone with no electronics background at all pick up this book? If not
what would be a good prerequisite book?

~~~
jeffwass
Yes, that's basically the purpose of this book. Though amazingly experts will
also learn many things and find it useful too.

I took the Physics 123 class at Harvard, from which this book developed from
the original course notes, and uses this as the textbook (the class is still
taught by Horowitz who has encyclopediac knowledge of electronics and Hayes
who replaced Hill when he left Harvard. These guys also wrote the accompanying
lab manual which I also highly recommend). You had all sorts of non-scientific
people in the class.

To give some context, one semester is split into two halves. The first half
covers analog electronics, and ends with a lab where the whole class designed
and built a system to take analog audio signal, pulse-width modulate it to an
IR transmitter, broadcast across the room to another receiver circuit that
demodulates, amplifies, and plays it. Designed by students that originally
never knew what a resistor or transistor was.

Second half is all digital, starts with glue logic and ends with the building
of a breadboard computer (68008, the 8-bit external bus flavor of 68008). We'd
write assembly programs into an EEPROM and program it to do all kinds of
things. Again, students that had no idea what a NAND gate was nor ever wrote a
line of code.

~~~
GregBuchholz
I wonder if anyone knows if there is a comparable reference for mechanical
engineering? Something that someone in a different discipline could use to get
at least conversant in. I'm a EE who has been interested in building more
mechanical things (especially how to compute things mechanically), but some of
my biggest problems are know what search terms to use when trying to look
things up. Like for instance I've been wanting something like a mechanical
multiplier/mixer. There would be one rotating input shaft, two rotating output
shafts (call them X and Y), and a "control" input which would direct the input
shaft motion to the output shafts in proportion to the control. So if the
control were at say the "zero" position, all the input motion would be
transmitted to the X shaft, and Y would be motionless. When the control was at
the "one" position, all the motion would be transmitted to the Y shaft, and X
would be stationary. The control would be continuously variable, and it would
be great if it also performed the sinusoidal conversion at the same time,
essentially:

    
    
        X = Input * sin(control)
        Y = Input * cos(control)
    

...I imagine something like this must exist, and deriving it from first
principles probably isn't exceedingly difficult, but knowing what it is called
is another matter.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I suppose the book I'm dreaming of would
cover things like gears/pulleys and their common/interesting combinations
(like a differential), springs, thermodynamics, hydraulics, linkages, heat
engines, etc.. And as long as I'm dreaming if there are also similar texts for
chemistry and cellular biology/DNA/genetic engineering, I'd also purchase
those.

------
throwaway000002
This is offtopic, but I need to ask this question and I fear I may loose the
opportunity to field it to this audience of experts. I'm interested in two
things and am wondering if this book, or something else, would be of use to
me. Assume I have strong math background, and assume I understand the Maxwell
equations. What book/resource provides a good understanding of the
approximations (from first principles) needed to provide a reasonable
simulation of say a (layered) circuit board and increasing frequency signals?
How about if you went more complex and wanted to understand (and again
simulate in software) say the behavior of 28nm CMOS circuits? Any help would
be appreciated. This is more of a longer-term/backburner project for me, but
I'd love to understand this aspect of hardware.

~~~
ChuckMcM
If you threw out an off topic post and actually put contact information in
your profile, and I had something to add, I would email you and nobody here
would care (although your off topic post might get downvoted into oblivion)
but submitting an off topic post with no way to contact you is not very
useful.

~~~
tlrobinson
"with no way to contact you"

Why doesn't the "reply" button suffice? Other people may be interested in the
answers.

------
jedp
It is a fantastic book. I'd also like to recommend Practical Electronics for
Inventors by Paul Scherz and Simon Monk ([http://www.amazon.com/Practical-
Electronics-Inventors-Paul-S...](http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-
Inventors-Paul-Scherz/dp/0071771336)).

I'm in the crowd that's getting into analog electronics and digital circuits
backwards, as it were, by starting with programmable microcontrollers
(Arduinos etc.) and moving outward from them on the circuit board. I found the
latter book was particularly well suited for self-learning. It is also huge
and, as far as I can tell, vastly comprehensive. The writing is clear and
concise. Explanations of concepts often draw on analogy, classical electrical
theory, and quantum physics alike. This multitude of approaches has helped me
grasp the fundamentals more firmly than other books. It also keeps an eye on
practical applications. Sections on, say, power rectifiers or op amps or
timers or debouncing circuits or whatever all show you many variations on a
theme, with discussion of what you would want to use in which situations.

Also, if I'm speaking to anyone else like me, software engineers who want to
know hardware, buy all the books you can, but get an oscilloscope. I waited
far too long for this purchase. I wouldn't write code without a debugger; this
is the hardware equivalent. I recently got this little Rigol model:
[https://www.adafruit.com/products/681](https://www.adafruit.com/products/681)
. It costs the same as a few big electronics books, and it's the difference
between stumbling around a room in the dark and having illumination
everywhere.

------
DanBC
The Art of Electronics, combined with the Student Workbook are excellent books
to teach yourself electronics.

I guess today you'd use electronic simulations on a computer rather than real
components on bread-boards with real test equipment. Perhaps some HNer is
involved with this type of simulation software? I might be worth creating
"labs" that can be used while reading tAoE?

~~~
VLM
I think the best analogy I can give for doing electronic labs online is the
way cisco certification tests were provided in a very limited simulation
presumably using regex's to see if you get it "right" (at least this is how it
was a decade ago) vs getting time at an actual router command line. Its a
different experience to do something real vs a simulation with pre-determined
conclusions and situations.

I'm struggling to think of a programming analogy, comparing getting a real
live REPL to getting some kind of not-REPL training environment. I don't think
there really is anything that bad in all of program writing.

What simulation is really good at is optimization. Its a useful skill but not
the only one. Maybe a good programming analogy would be ripping all the "write
a program" assignments out of a CS curriculum and replacing them all with
profiler exercises. So rather than writing your own bubblesort and quicksort,
you'd just run a profiler on someone elses sorting libraries and compare the
numerical results to get the expected result from the book.

A really good car analogy is I'm old enough that when we did Drivers Ed we had
simulation where driving scenes were projected on a screen and we
optimistically pretended to drive a car, vs the behind the wheel section of
drivers ed where we actually drove a real car around. Its kind of useful, kind
of, but I don't think you can really learn to drive a car by watching
carefully crafted movies of someone else driving.

~~~
gmt2027
I studied the Cisco networking materials 5-10 years ago but never actually got
round to taking the tests. Dynamips was a router hardware emulator for the
1700, 2600, 3600, 3700, and 7200 hardware platforms that booted up actual
Cisco IOS images.

With GNS3, it was possible to set up complex network topologies of dynamips
routers that would have cost thousands of dollars in real hardware without
losing any of the realism as these were essentially virtualised routers.

I haven't kept up with the progress here but Cisco certification may not be
the best example.

------
aswanson
This is a book that they should introduce freshman year to all ee
undergraduates. For some reason, the traditional first-year curriculum
mandates the same high school calculus and physics that bored the better
students in their teen years. But in my not so humble opinion, this is the
type of stuff they should start out with.

------
shanusmagnus
I have a MS in CSCI, PhD in cognitive psych, but know nothing at all about
electronics. Is this a reasonable first book? I ask bc somebody compared it to
TAOCP which I would not recommend to somebody with zero CSCI/programming
skills.

EDIT: thanks for the feedback, I'll look elsewhere to get my feet wet.

~~~
mcescalante
There is a lot of good introductory type material, but the book treats many
slightly advanced topics as though they are casual, and skips around topics
plenty. An example would be how quickly (within the 1st chapter) Thevenin
circuits come up. I remember taking an entire semester to get to these in my
EE coursework.

Many may say otherwise, but I would argue that this is a better reference than
it is a book to learn electronics from the ground up, but that doesn't mean
that you can't use it as a guide as you learn and look elsewhere for missing
info.

------
comboy
Hope it's for real this time. It was supposed to be out in early 2014

[http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/the-art-of-
electronics-3rd...](http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/the-art-of-
electronics-3rd-edition-finished-writing-and-copy-editing/)

~~~
CamperBob2
Sounds like it. Win Hill mentioned on Usenet a few weeks ago that it was
really done and in the hands of the publisher.

~~~
comboy
I can't wait to get my hands on it.

------
tdicola
Looks like Adafruit will have the book in its shop too:
[https://www.adafruit.com/products/2356](https://www.adafruit.com/products/2356)
Can see some better pics of it there.

------
rotoole
One of the coolest experiences I had in grad school at MIT was taking
professor Horowitz's Physics 123 class at Harvard, and reading this book cover
to cover in a semester. Pain!

FYI, AoE covers BOTH analog and digital circuits in great detail.

You don't need to know how a computer works in that level of detail, in order
to program it. But having started my education w/ high level languages like
Java, C, C++, etc... it was fun to work back down to voltages, capacitors,
buses, clocks, EPROM, transistors etc, and see how it all comes together end-
to-end.

------
adamboulanger
If they mess with transistor man, riot.

------
acd
Own this book previous edition.

What is good resources for learning electronics online? Are the online schools
like Codeschool and Codeacademy with tutorials anywhere that are good that you
can recommend?

~~~
kbart
There usually are few electronic related courses on Coursera. Haven't done any
of them yet, but I'm satisfied with the quality of their other courses. Check
"engineering" category here:

[https://www.coursera.org/courses?languages=en&categories=ee](https://www.coursera.org/courses?languages=en&categories=ee)

------
whistlerbrk
Never heard of this but the comments here are piquing my interest.

I'm currently reading Digital Computer Electronics (1977 edition, current
here: [http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Computer-Electronics-Albert-
Ma...](http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Computer-Electronics-Albert-
Malvino/dp/0028005945/)).

Would others agree this might be a nice follow up for me, especially if I'm
looking for more current material now that I (am starting to) get the
fundamentals?

~~~
tankgrrl
Indeed. The 2nd edition companion Student Manual by Tom Hayes (which will also
be updated) used in Harvard's class covers building a functioning computer
'from scratch'. Lots of practical labs and discussion in it.

Also, the AoE 3rd edition has a new chapter on microcontrollers.

I'll see if it's OK to post a table of contents of the new book here.

------
smoyer
Best electronics book ever ... Updated but even the older versions contain
relevant theory (though I gues when the 74xx parts are obsolete that would
change).

~~~
jeff_marshall
Indeed - the second edition was very helpful for me (An embedded SW/crypto
person by day doing basic electronics and ham radio as a hobby) during the
early 00's.

I didn't see a chapter list. I wonder whether FPGA technology will be touched
on at all? some of the modern small FPGAs are incredibly useful when paired
with a microcontroller or the newer uc++ boards like the edison. Then again,
so many new toys are available (DDS comes to mind for radio) that I imagine a
lot of newer tech is out of scope for a book that focuses on the fundamentals.
There's always the AARL books :)

------
vskarine
By far the best book written on the topic. I would argue it has all the
content of Computer Engineering degree in one book.

------
gadders
I always wanted a copy of this when it was recommended on my Comp Sys
Engineering B.Eng but never could afford it at the time.

I'm tempted to buy a copy now even though the closest I get to electronics
these days is configuring my router.

//edit//$120! It was £20 when it was recommended on my course in 1990 (IIRC).

~~~
gjm11
Inflation since 1990: a little more than 2x. Exchange rate: about 1.5x. So £20
in 1990 is something like $60 now.

So it's gone up by about a factor of 2. That's fairly sad, but it's not as
spectacular as the 20:120 ratio your comment suggests...

~~~
gadders
Well, it looks like it's been enhanced quite a bit. Not saying it's not worth
it, but it has jumped out of the "impulse buy" category.

------
mrfusion
Random question that's been bothering me (since I might have the attention of
electronics experts right now)

If I charge a simple parallel plate capacitor, and then pull they plates
apart, how does that affect the potential energy stored? Would it be hard to
pull apart?

~~~
Steuard
Let's set aside equations and think about this conceptually. To be clear about
the question here, I'm assuming that you have put a fixed charge onto each
plate (equal and opposite) and then isolated them (so the charges remain
constant). Here are the key ideas that are significant for this:

* Assuming the separation between the plates is always small compared to their diameter/size, parallel plate capacitors give rise to a very simple electric field pattern: it is essentially zero everywhere outside, and it is uniform throughout the region between the plates with a strength that is _independent_ of the separation. (Technically, it depends only on the area charge density: charge per unit area. All of this can be deduced from the electric field pattern of an infinite charged plane.)

* Capacitors store their energy within that electric field between the plates. All electric fields carry an energy density proportional to field strength squared, so the total energy stored in a uniform field is proportional to the volume occupied by that field.

So for your question, I can combine these ideas to recognize that pulling the
plates apart will result in a larger volume between the plates, and therefore
it must result in more stored energy (because the strength of the field in
between stays the same as you pull). That energy has to come from somewhere,
so I can deduce that I would have to put energy into the system while pulling:
it would indeed be hard to pull apart. (The level of "hard" would depend on a
lot of factors.)

(If you pull far enough so the separation isn't small compared to the plates'
diameter anymore, you'll pretty quickly reach a case where you can approximate
each plate as a point charge. Pulling those opposite charges apart clearly
requires work, too, though the force gets smaller as they get farther apart.)

~~~
mrfusion
Thanks. This is starting to make sense. So I guess if you connect the two
plates with a conductor after they were pulled apart, the increased energy
would take the form of higher voltage?

~~~
Steuard
That's right: the voltage in this case will be proportional to the separation
between the plates, so if you discharged them across a light bulb it would
(briefly!) glow much brighter if you pulled the plates apart first.

------
tlrobinson
FYI Amazon appears to have it for $12 less, including shipping:
[http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Electronics-Paul-
Horowitz/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Electronics-Paul-
Horowitz/dp/0521809266)

------
markrages
Ah, do they mean April 1st?

~~~
joshvm
Amazon says not until the 4th July in the UK.

------
hoboon
I wonder if they're going to do the same for the lab manual? I have a copy of
the 2nd addition and there are instructions to mail a physical paper letter to
addresses for parts.

------
epaladin
I was lucky enough to find a copy of the 2nd ed. in the closet of an apartment
I moved into during college. I really need to actually read it sometime!

------
aceperry
I loved that book. Glad to see an update. It has much practical advice that
you don't get in the classroom.

------
fnordfnordfnord
At last!

------
ausjke
can I pre-order at amazon? i have the 2nd but would like to get 3rd,
preferably in e-book format though

update: it's on amazon, just pre-ordered one copy for $108

------
gketuma
can't wait for this. Time to step my Electronics Design game up.

