ee books

Two of my faves

Also a good choice--lots better than the follow-ons

Terman's "Radio Engineering"

Bode's "Network Analysis and Feedback Amplifier Design"

Hollister's "High Frequency Amplifier Design"

Gardner's "Phaselock Techniques"

Here's my "100 good books" list that we kicked around here some years ago:

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

If you need to do anything with radio, the ARRL Handbook is a good kick-start, though not very scientific.

It's not a circuits book, but I like "Building Scientific Apparatus" Moore, Davis and Coplan.

George H.

I strongly second the "ARRL Handbook" suggestion. Very good bang for the buck and every analog guy should know some radio stuff. Other:

Motorola CMOS Logic Data (only used, I have the 1987 version), or something similar that explains the innards of CMOS logic in great detail. Very good to understand and to learn how to press logic chips into service in unorthodox ways.

Unitrode IC Data Handbook, now somewhere on the TI server. Best tutorial on switchers I ever had.

Pressman wrote a good book about switch-mode converters but I never bought it because there wasn't a need anymore for me (designed so many switchers that they came out of my ears).

At least one book on IC design, to understand the intricacies, opportunities, limitations and pathologies of ICs in general. Also to see when a custom design makes sense and when it doesn't. Mine is old, Geiger et al "VLSI Design Techniques for Analog and Digital Circuits", but the know-how in there never gets old. They still cook with water these days, they just use bigger pots.

Skolnik "Radar Handbook". Might not be too applicable for what you guys do but if you do or plan on any pulse-echo processing it's almost a must-have.

Many may argue its too theoretical, but for a guy with a double degree in Physics and EE it may be a very good reference for analog design on the discrete component level:

Gray, Hurst, Lewis, Meyer, Analysis and Design of Analog Integrated Circuits, Wiley. (My copy is the 4th edition, haven't checked whether there are newer editions.)

Although its focus is IC design, I find it very useful even for a non IC designer, being one of the few contemporary texts about the details of analog circuits. It kind of begins, where (the analog part of) AoE ends ...

Klaus

Always a handy reference.

Only the really old manuals have gate-level schematics of the IC's... handy for me... when I need some logic in one of my chip designs, I just need to build the device-level equivalent, and not have to fret/re-derive to internal logic requirements. (I have stuff dating back to the very early '70's ;-)

I buy just about every one that comes out... if I garner one idea out of a book it's worth the price.

I have all the old M.I.T. Lincoln Labs stuff ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Tell him not to sit down and try to cram all that into his head all at once. Rather, pose him a job to do, then have him go shopping in tables of contents and indexes for relevant material.

And don't expect him to have a good idea of which ideas are sexy but ultimately stupid vs. ideas that are rock-solid reliable -- you only get that from experience combined with intelligence and humility. You'll have to take the time to have him propose something on paper or whiteboard, then discuss why it's good or bad, then let him run off and incorporate it into the growing design.

For the most part, once I had the foundation of my EE classes, I think I learned most of my practical circuit design from the ARRL Handbook (there it is again!) and the National Semiconductor and Motorola data books.

I think the only circuits class I ever took that was directly applicable was an active filters class, the book for which sits on my shelf and gets tugged out whenever I need to make some desired frequency response with op-amps. The title is "Passive and Active Network Analysis and Synthesis" by Budak, Houghton Mifflin. I'm too lazy to look up the copyright date.

(That was a strange class for me. Usually I did terrible in easy classes because I wasn't LEARNING anything, and I was bored to tears. This class was a graduate-level class taught by a guy who never got past a Master's degree; it was one of the EASIEST electronics courses I ever took, yet every day I learned something useful. It was a lifesaver, because the one other class I was taking was so damned hard I thought my brain would liquefy and drip out my ears, and that's the only time _that_ ever happened to me, too.)

Any link to a copy of that? I have a paperback copy, but would prefer a PDF... I'm getting buried in paper and books ;-)

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I liked

"Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineering" by Henry W Ott

I believe it is on the TI server now but don't know where. I am using this stuff less and less. After a couple of decades of switcher design it's engrained.

It's here,

That's a tome. You like the app notes Joerg?

George H.

As long as we are giving John's new hire a summer reading list.... I also like S. Franco's book on opamps "Design with operational..etc" And I sometimes find myself looking in a physics of semiconductors book. Sze, or maybe B. Streetman's "Solid state electronic devices"

That's a good link... back-up one level and book-marked!

There's Tom Frederiksen's "Intuitive OpAmps"... a real easy read. ...Jim Thompson

Along with AoE, Pressman, ARRL, Jim Williams, Terman etc I'd suggest Pease: Troubleshooting Analog Circuits.

I haven't got a copy myself but always thought Don Lancaster's CMOS cookbook looked fun too. Marcus Scroggie (Cathode Ray) wrote some wonderful essays in the 1950s which I recommend.

For RF work in more detail than ARRL handbook the Wes Hayward: Experimental Methods in RF Design is a keeper too.

piglet

I have the complete Tektronix set on TV signals... extremely useful, even today. ...Jim Thompson

I will second that.

Mark

Thanks. Excellent!

Mostly, yes. They taught me more about electronics than months at the university. To the point where I asked myself "Why did I ever build linear regulators?".

Oh, I forgot one book, just so the new guy always gets reminded why he did not hire on with a major corporation:

I don't use the ARRL book much. Actually, never. We don't do sine waves.

The old National Linear Applications book was pretty good. Analog Devices published a phone-book-sized Basic Linear Design book in 2007 that was very good. That used to cost $30 or some such.

Here it is under another name, same editor, probably same book:

I have it, don't much like it. Pease did another design book, sort of a very bad version of AoE.

Sure, I'll start him on a simple project, so he can learn how things work around here. It will take a year or five for him to pick up serious circuit design; we do a lot of weird stuff here. But I'd like to have a good assortment of books around. And I like books, too.

One book that I don't have would be a practical (ie, not a lot of academic math, lots of pictures) text on Signals and Systems, which would be waveforms, spectra, filtering, convolution, modulation, detection, all that stuff.