AoE 3rd Edition coming soon? A question for Winfield

I seem to recall he posted more recently than 1998 about the next edition, though that was likely two years or so ago.

I get the feeling chances are good that there will be a third edition, but it's a long time coming.

Michael

Is what got me going. However, I notice that Amazon and Barnes N Noble appear oblivious. I somehow recall Amazon typically having general data on books prior to their release, but who knows.

Hopefully I haven't painted Winfield (nor Paul) into a corner now with the links. ;-P

I guess we'll see.

-Phaeton

There is a rumour that Paul and Win are in negotiation with the producers of 'Star Trek Enterprise' for an episode where they are recombobulated to solve a problem with the deep core electronics of the something or another that was designed by Zaphod Beeblebrox.

As a result of the above statement the crew have access to the 2nd Edition, preserved from a car boot sale but, unfortunately, Zefram Cochrane was referring to the 1st Edition.

Having discovered that Zaphod resulted from a problem with the MySQL database, and is a has been from the days of the BBC (there is a problem with recombobulation resulting in a bloke with one head who knows f*ck all about electronics) they find that Zefram, the true holder of all things multidimensional is otherwise out to lunch.

As a last resort our Heroes are brought back to life but who should the crew believe The Old Senile Bloke or the Young Buck?

As the clock ticks down to final Galactic Armageddon.

Captain Jonathon Archer tries to come to terms with the father he has lost to a war torn mind. 'You're the bloke who skipped through time and dressed up as a woman, my son would not do this to me'.

Sub-Commander T'Pol finds herself in love with a Legend she will never understand.

How many cardigans must she knit with No.1 needles to win the heart of this quiet and tormented stranger?

Is the number an integer?

Who will discover the final meaning of the colour code?

Will it provide the answer?

Why did the BOFH rip me off?

The final twist to the tail..... I leave you in anticipation.

DNA

Very very good points, however, you've overlooked a few minor details-

Prior to the S.O.L. crashing to earth, Tom Servo destroyed all but two of his clones (under direction of Dr. Who). Instead, he jettisoned them into outer space, where they've since hooked up with Obi Wan Tapioca to fight off the likes of Feyd and the blister-faced floating fat guy.

Oar something.

(Otherwise, I give you a thumbs up for the post. I'm nowhere near as imaginative as you) :-D

-Phaeton

I've downloaded "Thinking in C++", vols. 1 and 2, and they do a clever thing - at the end of each chapter, there's a little review, and a link which says, "To get the answer sheet, just visit ..." and they sell the _answer sheet_! :-)

Probably not a whole heck of a lot of money in it, but who knows? In any case, Win Hill and Mr. Horowitz should certainly be compensated for their time!

I hadn't heard that so much good stuff would get gone, but there must be a lot more bleeding-edge stuff in it, or something. :-)

Thanks! Rich

Do you suppose that he's keeping us salivating, just so it will be a big hit when it hits the streets? ;-) There's at least a dozen people just around s.e.d who would buy the thing. Win, are you going to go around and do book signings? ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Speaking of Zephram Cochrane, (sp?) I think a way kewl idea for a new space opera series would be something like: "Star Trek: The Other Side" It picks up where the other alternate universe story leaves off - Hoshi, having just dispatched Archer (albeit relatively painlessly), and captaining the way, way advanced Enterprise that's from the future in the "good" universe. The final line in the ep is something like, "This is Empress Sato."

Would it be kewl to see The Earth Empire kicking the Klingons' asses, and enslaving the Vulcans? >:->

Cheers! Rich the nerd "recombobulated" - heh! I like that! ;-) Recombobulate yourself!

Tom Servo? Wasn't he the partner of H. Ross Perobot?

Thanks! Rich

Last I heard (here in SED), there was no firm release date. Win jokes about it once in a while. Search his old posts.

Personally, I recommend you buy the 2nd edition in the mean time, just in case...

--Mac

Wow, a whole dozen?!?! That sure is a big hit. Seriously, what I find truly amazing is that AoE is listed around nr 7500 (of about 4.5 million!) on Amazon's top book sellers list.

--DF

The book is a university text book - admittedly aimed at bright students. Paul Horowitz originally developed it for his electronics for physicists ourse at Harvard, and it was an undergraduate text in the electronic engineering course at Cambridge University in the U.K. when I was working in Cambridge (not at the university).

Successful undergraduate textbooks sell very well - a psychologist that I know got a $250,000 advance from his pulbisher for the third edition of his first-year psychology textbook, which only stands at 52,000 in the Amazon sales rankings.

I'm sorry, but no. We're only about 1/3 through the project, but we intend to pick up the pace. The 3rd-edition listings seem to have come from the ISBN number that was assigned for the project, and perhaps a leak from a project database at C.U.G., we haven't been able to get a definitive answer.

Yes. Huge portions of the 2nd edition will disappear, to slightly shorten the book, and to make room for new material. For example, most of the last third of the book is at risk. Selected portions from the deleted chapters will be moved into advanced "X-chapters" following each conventional chapter, but much good material will be lost. BTW, lots of good stuff in the first edition didn't make it into the 2nd edition.

Smattering? The student manual will be updated.

That's not wholly true. Our book was written as a reference book as well as a textbook. To the extent we start at a basic level, we hoped the book could be a self-learning and reference tool for a non-engineer or hobbyist. We wanted to appeal to graduate students in fields other than physics or engineering. It's true that Paul's motivation to work on the book came in part from his need for a book for Physics 123, the Harvard Physics dept electronics course. But my motivation came from a desire to tell the world about my bag of design tricks and my favored back-of-the-envelope approach to electronics engineering. As we say in the preface, it's a book by a practicing engineer and a teacher. Even though the early project-pitch to publishers was based on Paul's class notes, there's not much in common between them and the finished book. That early pitch to publishers, BTW, resulted in a stream of rejections.

It does do well in Amazon's rankings and has sold over 500,000 copies worldwide, IIRC. But our publisher's analysis shows that less than half of those were for classroom textbook use. Our book is clearly not optimally designed as a textbook, it has far too much reference material that's not relevant to teaching and confuses the student who's preparing for taking exams. It's ideally oriented, in our minds, to a scientific experimenter who needs to make something to improve their experiment.

It can be helpful to a classically-educated electronics engineer who needs to pick up some practical circuit-design skills. You know, the engineer who may be well trained in FPGAs, microprocessors and MatLab, but who doesn't know much about soldering irons, JFETs, opamp current sources, or power transformers with bridge rectifiers and filter caps. It also goes into considerable detail in some areas not often taught in EE school, but often needed in the real world, such as low-noise amplifiers and low-power circuit-design tricks.

I never find an application circuit in that thing when I'm looking for one.

I'm an engineer, so I never look for application circuits; I design circuits. What I look for in a book like AoE [1] is ideas, tricks, lore, and new perspectives.

John

suggestions for 3rd edition

1. more on UHF and above RF
2. more on high speed sampling, better explation of aliasing and practical FFTs
3. more info on basic conductivity, insulators in a medium or high voltage environment, very high value resistors, and measuring low ohms.

I often find myself handing my copy of edition two to chemical engineers working on their masters and doctorates in Polymer Science. We do have some here working on really conductive pastes for replacing solder. A few work on better HV insulators. Many chemists have a hard time wrapping their minds around Ohm's law, let alone using a Keithly electrometer. Simple leakage in insulators really blows their minds. A few hours with AOE usually gets them asking the right questions

Thanks, Steve Roberts

If you narrow your focus to op-amp designs, Jim's suggestion of "Intuitive IC Op Amps" by Fredericksen has a lot of practical hints & tricks within.

---Joel

While you're waiting for the 3rd edition of AoE, Rick Carter's DSP book has plenty on this topic... it's also an Amazon.Com best seller for good reason.

Winfield, could you drop me a line by e-mail about a related project? Either your e-mail isn't working or I haven't successfully reverse-engineered the address. Thanks.

mc at uga dot edu