Indian textbooks

I have a handful, and so long as you know what you're getting, they're fine: The paper is rather thinner (which is actually a good thing in terms of shelf/backpack space and weight, but a downside in terms of the chance of accidentally ripping a page... and some people are bothered by the bleed-through from the pages behind the current one) and generally not "acid free" (so it will yellow over the course of a decade or so), but for the price differential, it can absolutely be worth it.

I have a copy of "RF Microelectronics" by Razavi that has a large box on the back proclaiming, "For sale and distribution in the People's Republic of China exclusively (except Taiwan, Hong Kong SAR and Macao SAR)." I don't know if that's just the publisher's preference vs. something having to do with copyright law, though.

This is a fun read:

---Joel

Something to keep in mind is that you may want to reference your text books in a decade or two. I still look up some of my old texts 30 yrs later, so rental may not be a good idea. I often see text books on local for sale websites as well.

Probably shouldn't take this as general advice, I'm a know-it-all...

Tim

When first starting out, no one knows which books will be useful and which books will be practically useless. Moreover, some books only become useful "in real life" and after you read them. Therefore, I believe that it's important to acquire books and have them handy, just in case.

According to my experience, a 10/90 ration is a bit of an stretch. I can say that from the "real life" needs alone I've re-opened somewhere between 30% to 40% of the books that I've purchased. Yet, by "re-opened" I mean anything from looking up a specific technical term to learn new techniques which weren't covered in the coursework.

Rui Maciel

I have just a few, they're mostly okay. I frequently buy used books for classic information. New ones when I have a specific (say a project) need for relatively up-to-date information (hit and miss, but at least there is a budget to pay for the misses). I also have a lot of ebooks (the most useful ones I also own in paper, but the ebooks are more portable). Occasionally the author or publisher will re-issue a book that is out of print and very expensive on the used market, so it's worthwhile to search around. One recent example is "Astronomical Algorithms" (Meeus), which is $60+ used and $30 new!

I'd only go the rent/photocopy/ebook route if I thought I'd only need the book to pass a course I really wasn't interested in. Examples of books you want on the shelf pretty much forever are physics, chemistry, materials science, assuming you stay in Engineering.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

I've got a mind like a sieve, so I sorta need to look back in them....

Best real life source of tech info I know of is those rare older guys who have done it all & enjoy imparting their knowledge in others. They seem to be few & far between.

Keats Pullen's wife once wrote to me, that he was tickled pink to see his books cloned cheaply in SEA. Technical publishing in North America was, and is, a mug's game.

RL

Wow, that doesn't say much about your professors!

Some books become recommended or essential textbooks because it has links to the lecturer or subject co-ordinator - normally royalty payments.

It was the same here at uni, a decade ago -- not many keepers in the textbooks. Apart from the C++ one, being my only book on C. Perl books I bought separately from Amazon, the brief guide they expected us to learn and use the language from, for assignments, was way too brief. But I keep most of the textbooks in case I need to reference them, that's rare though.

Grant.

Most of the time, the professors were better at explaining things than the books were.

Figure the average textbook is extremely technical and awful at explaining anything. Everything is described in its own language / terminology / diagrams, so that, if you already know the subject well, it makes perfect sense, but if you don't know much about it, it's meaningless. The point of textbooks is learning, so I don't understand why they write them this way.

I suppose, if they wrote books that made sense (like AoE*), professors would be out of a job.

The main reason I make the 90/10 statement should be obvious to anyone who's read my posts over the last couple of years. I've tought myself more than half the average undergrad EE curriculum. Even the best textbook, if it's about basic circuit theory for instance, is just taking up space on the shelf.

Tim

Those prices are insane. Even Lulu.com could do better, one off.

Lulu has lost a lot of my respect as of late for no longer allowing you to search for *only* items published by Lulu itself.

If I had wanted to search for books by the big publishers, I'd have gone to Amazon or similar to begin with!

Maybe things would be a bit different if the prices practised there weren't so obscenely high. Adding to that, it always bugged me how it is possible to get the same book, brand new, on, for example, a english book store for less than a third of the price asked by an american book store.

Rui Maciel

I have kept all of mine (well, except for one or two) as a matter of policy. Some are real klunkers, and there are maybe 2 or 3 reliably useful ones.

Though I'm a hobbyist rather than an EE, I've collected textbooks whenever I could. Some are barely worth their shelf-space. Others, like, yes, AoE get re-read regularly. Some are bought because my local city's technical library stopped being superb.

My latest find, on Amazon, is a H-P opto-electronics application manual (c)1977. This was worth every penny for a paragraph which mentioned that their opto-couplers' LED==> photo-diode CTR was ~0.0015 (~0.15%) across a range of devices. It let me get a step further in my efforts to model 6n139 split Darlington by extending the Avago 6n136 Spice subckt...

{FWIW, on a sample of 25 6n139 chips, I've found Q1 hFE =45.1, 37~~53, SD(n-1) 3.6 and Q2 hFE 101.1, 92~~110, SD(n-1) 5.0

Now I need Q2's Early voltage but my curves' tangents don't converge... }

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The word 'book' has been copyrighted by facebook. Please refrain from using it or you will be sued.

You might find something in the book's copyright notice to the effect that it is only for distribution in a limited number of countries.

Publishers make deals for cheaper books in places like India (where the market won't support US prices), but they are not supposed to be re-imported.

You probably won't get in trouble. The people who do a volume business shipping these things in might.

Bawg. I remember when Lotus and IBM each tried to copyright "2". I swear it is a dBased society we live in.