Electronics and great technical books on archive.org
Jeff DeWall 4 min read September 22, 2018I've been away from blogging for a few months and haven't had much time for personal projects either. I recently moved from Vienna back to the US, now living in Denver. So far I'm loving it; it's nice to come back after a number of years abroad, even if I will miss many parts of life in Europe.
Getting into Electronics
I've recently gotten into electronics more deeply than I've had a chance to do before. I took a number of EE courses in college, but didn't have much of a chance to apply it since I went into software development. There are some amazing resources online nowadays for getting started or increasing your knowledge.
For starters, there are some great channels on YouTube. The one that really got me into things was EEVBlog. I recently followed most of the recommendations on setting up an electronics lab from a video of that is a few years old. Some of the links are outdated now, but the items are easy enough to find.
A close second for piquing my interest was the series of videos from Ben Eater about building an 8-bit CPU from discrete chips. I'm planning on doing my own build of Ben Eater's CPU, although I will likely make some changes like increase the amount of memory
Thirdly, I love watching the repair videos from Retro Man Cave's channel. They got me excited about actually pulling apart old systems and being able to diagnose real issues and fix them.
Classic Technical books
I stumbled upon a trove of amazing old technical books on archive.org recently. I had poked around a bit before, but never thought about looking for some classics that I'd been wanting to read.
For instance, you can find The Art of Electronics 2nd Edition, which is a classic book that you hear recommended by many folks. Even though there is a 3rd edition that was published a few years ago, the 2nd still gets high marks for sections on good versus bad circuits at the end of various chapters.
Another book I recently heard about and found there was [High Speed Digital Design, a Book of Black Magic] (https://archive.org/details/HighSpeedDigitalDesignJohnsonGraham). Note that the preview shows the first of four books from the same authors. The one I'm talknig about here is the fourth in the pdf list.
I saw a review on Amazon from Bil Herd, an engineer who worked on the Commodore 128 and Plus4, and has videos on Hackaday, talking about this being one of his favorite books on high speed design. It's now high on my list of books to read through, sitting comfortably on my iPad.
I also was able to find the book HDL Chip Design, recommended by Jeri Ellsworth in her video on books for learning FPGA programming, which is another area I've been diving into more deeply.
I had learned some VHDL in school, but having now discovered Verilog, I'm more interested in playing around with it. Verilog is a bit cleaner in syntax to me, looking a bit more like C, but as if everything were super multi-threaded.
Speaking of C, you can even find the C Programming language 2nd ed, which was the first programming book I ever owned, receiving it as a gift when I was 13.
Now I've got some reading to get back to, catch you next time!