Basic advance question - design of photodiode amplifiers

On a sunny day (Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:38:11 -0400) it happened Phil Hobbs wrote in :

Silly, 'nightlights' seems to be on your mind all the time. Have you any idea what optocouplers (and photo transistors) are used for?

Thank you, unfortunately it seems that anybody who looked at one aspect of something and writes some paper on it, can be Dr. Well OK that is the way it is. Slow IRDA?

Somewhat more than a paper and somewhat more than one aspect:

If you're doing anything electro-optical and non-trivial, you need this book.

John

Seconded.

There is also a lot of good general analog and low noise electronics stuff in there, as well as "electro-optical". It has an unusual combination of hands-on practical advice, optical and electronic theory, with advanced (to me anyway) mathematical techniques.

Ditto. I just picked up some good pointers from the book that are helping me design my picoamp preamp thing. I suppose I ought to just try to contract with Phil to do it for me - he'd be better at it, no doubt - but I want to hassle it myself, and maybe learn things.

I like the quotations at the start of each chapter, sort of like an e/o version of Middlemarch [1].

John

Philip, Any content difference between that in the 2000 edition and the new release?

...Jim Thompson

Yes, about 100 pages' worth of new stuff, plus some rejiggering of discussions that generated more than their fair share of bewildered questions. I have this tendency to gauge the difficulty of material by how long ago I learned it...so I blasted through some stuff way too fast--stuff like frequency plans and compression levels, which I (figuratively) got with my mother's milk. For instance, the bug zapper signal processing example nearly doubled in length, and there are sections on thinking in decibels, and that sort of stuff. For more advanced folk, there's more on infrared detection, Footprints, various kinds of modulators, noise temperature, noise cancellers, and so forth.

The book is 800 pages plus index, because they switched to a smaller font. I lost the battle against those horrible pictorial covers--jacket blurbs should be on the dust jacket where you can decently toss them out when you get the book home.

I've been having terrible trouble with the index--they stopped accepting WordPerfect, so I had to change to LaTeX because I wasn't going to use Word at any price, and their macro sets make it really hard to get accurate pagination for the index. I still owe it to them--probably get done this coming week, so the second edition will be out in June or July.

Cheers

Phil

WordPerfect, indeed - gets me feeling all Charlton Heston-ish; "Cold, dead hands" an all that. Word is for the HR types ...

New edition, it's a race between you and Win then is it? ;-)

et

Ah, but Win's had two editions under his belt for almost three decades. Phil will have to roll out a quick third edition sometime between June and "When It's Done" to catch up. Which I guess means he's in no rush at all. :-)

Tim

Yeah, but he had a 11-year head start. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs