Best books for people changing fields?

I'd add:

Williams. Electronic Filter Design Handbook. It's "the" filter designer's book. Has all the tables and explanation one needs. Except WDF but those are missing from almost all books. The only one I know that's good would be in German and probably out of print but I guess you don't want that. Filters may not often be needed on optical systems but on my last one I did.

Johnson, Graham. High Speed Digital Design, A Handbook of Black Magic. For those that aren't familiar with noise, crosstalk and stuff leaking from digital sections of a circuit.

ARRL Handbook. Full to the brim with RF stuff that can be adapted when one needs to cook up fast circuitry. Also very good hints for how to do fast and low cost prototyping.

Everybody needs a good book on high-speed circuit and pcb design, except that there ain't one.

One classic is Knoll, Radiation Detection and Measurement.

I'm not a fan of Terman. He was pompous, and mean to the Varian brothers.

Roger the two Williams books.

Tuma, Handbook of Physical Calculations.

Dorf/CRC, The EE Handbook, good complement to Ref Data for Radio Engineers.

The Williams+Taylor filter book is a must-have.

Dotto Lancaster, Active Filter Cookbook.

Smith, The Scientists and Engr's Guide to DSP, readable by mere mortals.

And everyone should have and read the RadLab books.

Pozar, Microwave Engineering.

And the soon-to-be classic, Larkin, Electronics from Scratch.

John

Seriously? When? Where?

-- Regards, Joerg

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam. Use another domain or send PM.

I'm thinking about starting on it any day now. The Brat and some other people around here need to learn electronics, so I figure I'll do a lecture series and bookish thing together. As soon as I finish this #$%^&*(! firmware.

John

"Understanding Digital Signal Processing" by Richard G Lyons seems good.

I'm not qualified to add anything to your bibliography.

It appears that you're taking user comments seriously:

Incidentally, the link from page 1 of your book for background references:

doesn't work and should be:

instead. Howlers?

However, I do have a humble request. Please include in the bibliography the latest revision number and especially the revision date for each publication (not the date of initial publication). That's so I can tell the difference between ancient history and recent technology. Yes, I know it's a major exercise, but I find it very useful.

Also, the standard complaint about the high price of technical books:

Best of luck...

I know that the following are old books but they are so instructive that in my opinion you may consider listing them. They are all easy reading (which can be a great advantage). If you're not familiar with them they are certainly worth a look, especially Tyman's book.

A E Conrady Applied Optics and Optical Design Conrady is considered by many (especially me) to be the father of modern optical design. Although this book was written before the advent of computers it contains all the elements necessary to understand how lens design is performed.

F Twyman, Prism and Lens Making, Second Edition This book is really obsolete but makes good reading for anyone interested in how optics were made in the old days. It is the definitive work. However, it does describe in detail how to measure and make lenses and prisms and is most instructive in giving the student an in depth knowledge of the art. One can learn the basics, including items that are not obvious and are often overlooked today. everyone interested in lens manufacture should read this book.

D.P. Feder, "Automatic Optical Design," Appl. Opt. 2, 1209-1226 (1963). This landmark paper is easy to read paper and describes how damped least sqares optimization can be implemented.

It's good that at least one of your daughters is interested. A friend of mine with a similar business (but in the aeronautical field) isn't so lucky. They daughters won't likely take over, yet for all of us comes the day we want to retire or have to.

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The list looks good to me.

I would suggest "Electromagnetic Principles of Integrated Optics" by Donald L. Lee because it develops all the material needed to understand waveguiding optics from first prinicples (ie Maxwell's Equations) and it seemed to flow so well that it was possibly the first time I intuitevly understood how those beasts really worked with relation to optics.

I also liked "Radiometric System Design" by Clair L. Wyatt. I liked it because it had the optical and electrical system components in the same book with a decent basic principle discussion, a system feasibility discussion (with examples) and a detailed design type discussion. It is primarily targeted toward IR applications but the concepts are applicable to other systems.

"Intuitive Analog Circuit Design" by Marc T. Thompson is a good addition to your list. This is a good book for someone who wants some thing more than an Analog Circuit Design 101 type book but doesn't want to get bogged down in more scholarly books like Microelectronic Circuits" by Sedra and Smith. Then I also suggest you replace Gray and Meyer. Analysis and Design of Analog Integrated Circuits with a more recent book like "Microelectronic Circuits" Fifth Edition by Sedra and Smith or Microelectronic Circuit Design" Third Edition by Jaeger and Blalock. .

Howard

I would add: Malacara, Optical Shop Testing. This is the bible for optical component testing, but also many of the techniques can be used for all sorts of precision metrology applications.

Yoder. Optomechanical Systems Design. One of the better books on this subject.

Sorry, I just noticed you already had these on your list. I was looking for them in the optics section.

-Adam Norton

I certainly do, but that one wasn't for lack of trying. The bibliography from the first edition wound up on the cutting room floor due to length, as did the thermal control chapter. It also had thumbnail reviews. I suspect that reviewer had technical papers in mind more than books, anyway--and one seldom learns much lore from a journal paper, because all the false starts and banged shins get left out.

Having that wrong on P 1 was a bit embarrassing, you're right! It's in the errata--the URL is listed correctly in several other places in the book.

That's more or less there already--I chopped off the first names, edition, publisher, date, and so on to make the list a bit more readable in a Usenet post. For books that have been in print continuously, I supply the edition number, and for things like Timoshenko that are "classic reprints", I mention that it's a reprint of the 1959 edition. Would that meet your concern adequately?

Hard to avoid in optics books, unfortunately--there are about 1/10 as many optics people as there are circuits people, and about 1/100 as many as there are programmers (and about 1/10000 as many as there are people who read potboilers at the beach). That's why programming books are cheaper. For an optics book, 5000 copies is a runaway best-seller. The publisher is committed to keeping the price down, as the first edition sold relatively well.

Thanks,

Phil Hobbs

I haven't read it, but I ordered it from the library. Thanks.

I thought about this, and I may still put it in...it's got so much disinformation mixed with the good stuff, though, and I still haven't got over laughing at Johnson for his static electricity demo purporting to show ground currents in circuit boards. Hysterical.

Concur. It's listed as just "The Radio Amateur's Handbook", with a note to the effect that editions before 1990 had a lot more of that stuff. I got interested in electronics by reading salacious articles about kilowatt PAs in the 1966 edition, which I still have.

Thanks again,

Phil Hobbs

That's radiation as in alpha, beta, and gamma, I take it?

He's safely dead now, though. Of course, they are too. I know Terman's son Lew slightly.

Hadn't heard of it, but I ordered it from the library.

That one's in the library's reference section. I'll have to go look at it on Monday.

Okay, that's on my list to look at.

I didn't like this one much, but I'll have another look. It's around here somewhere.

They don't have that one, but it's available for download at

Good for the soul, of course, but still useful for electro-optics folk?

Just scratch, or Old Scratch? ;) Sounds like an amazing book already.

Thanks,

Phil Hobbs

I used to own a copy, but found it so impenetrable that I threw it out when I ran out of bookshelf space. (It was the Dover reprint.) It seemed to be solid hand-calculation tricks from cover to cover--what am I missing?

Sounds like a fun one--I have it someplace but haven't read it. I'll dig it out. Is this one better than Texereau?

Thanks,

Phil Hobbs

An annotated bibliography would be good, even if you write just a few sentences describing each one.

Failing that, perhaps a *, **, *** system (or similar) to classify them as introductory, intermediate, advanced, so the reader knows which ones to start with, depending on background.

Some of the books you list aren't very useful to the reader until they've spent years in the field (not necessarily electro-optics, either), definite *** material. They can be very, very good books, and useful to own, since you can still be learning things from them after 10 years.

How about sut-categories?

Lists of functions, integrals etc, such as

are very different from more general books on mathematical methods,

which are again very different from numerical methods:

R. E. Collin, Field Theory of Guided Waves is a good book. Not that I use more than a 1/2 chapter out of it, but I like it.

An introductory book would be good. Don't expect people to be able to start with Jackson. How about Griffiths? Not dumbed-down, but reasonable accessible.

For example. in OPTICS, you list Hecht and not just Born & Wolf - something for everybody.

If you list this, add the other Landau & Lifshitz field theory book, Classical Theory of Fields.

I don't know this book. Does anybody have any comments on it?

I like McConnell, Code Complete. I haven't seen the 2nd edition.

Cool. I ordered it from the library. How does it stack up against Kawano & Kitoh?

Interesting, thanks. Is it accessible to non-radiometrists? People who don't know a metrelambert from an apostilb?

Thanks again,

Phil Hobbs

I bought a copy recently but haven't done more than skim it. I'll put it on the list, thanks.

I'm not familiar with those ones...It isn't the IC design part that I like about Gray and Meyer, it's mainly the device stuff. That's good enough to help people do their own discrete designs, and also to understand how to apply ICs they buy. G&M have a good discussion of bipolars as well as CMOS.

Are Sedra & Smith and Jaeger & Blalock good for that as well as for actual IC design?

Thanks,

Phil Hobbs