The best Integrated Circuits books: Reddit reviews

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Depending on your current knowledge of course:

https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Third-Scherz/dp/0071771336

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0521809266/ref=dp_ob_neva_mobile

These cover ALOT of material. I have practical electronics. It gives some of the physics which is nice. You'll get circuit analysis, transistors, amplifier, op amps pretty much anything covered in your circuits courses. It even gets into some digital topics as well. I recommend it!

Edit: let me know current you're knowledge of EE and I can recommend more.

Bebop to Boolean Boogie is pretty good. Very easy and fun book to read. Covers a ton of great entry level topics.

https://www.amazon.com/Bebop-Boolean-Boogie-Unconventional-Electronics/dp/1856175073/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=bebop+to+boolean+boogie&qid=1573568129&sr=8-1

Then move towards something more FPGA specific like

https://www.amazon.com/FPGA-Prototyping-Verilog-Examples-Spartan-3/dp/0470185325/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=fpga+verilog+examples&qid=1573568177&sr=8-2

~~Knowing C will probably hurt you more than help you. Forget what you know about C when learning Verilog.~~ You need to approach learning Verilog in a different manner. Verilog is not another top-down procedural language expressing instructions one after another. There are some general programming tenets that still hold true, and attention to detail in regards to syntax is important. But forget about line-by-line procedural execution because that's not how these hardware description languages work. You need to learn DIGITAL DESIGN before you learn Verilog....

EDIT: for clarity and to tighten up my thoughts.

Honestly my go-to is probably odd but it's very complete (doesn't cover layout but that's very tool-specific and thus temporal/changing over time): Printed Circuits Handbook. Much of what you need to know isn't directly tactical to your project.

Alors, y'a deux bon bouquins, malheureusement je ne connais pas les titres en francais (si ils existent).

Practical Electronics for Inventors, Fourth Edition, C'est juste une bible sur l'elec, ça couvre tous les trucs de base et un avec un certain niveau de profondeur. C'est un bon morceau à lire par contre, genre 5kg de papier bible.

How to Diagnose and Fix Everything Electronic, Second Edition, C'est beaucoup plus pratique sur le comment s'y prendre, les outils, la logique pour réparer des trucs. Après tu seras forcément limité par ce que tu comprends du 1er.

> Forrest Mims

I have 5-6 of them; you could get them from Radio Shack back in the day. I think they may have compiled them all into one book

Start here: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/

Follow up with YouTube videos on particular topics that are confusing/interesting.

As for a great book, check out Practical Electronics for Inventors. Get the book, not the kindle version, which apparently has some formatting issues and stuff missing.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1259587541/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_PGN4W8MATXTD2R7Z158C

Practical Electronics for Inventors. Get the book, not the kindle version, which apparently has some formatting issues and stuff missing.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1259587541/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_PGN4W8MATXTD2R7Z158C

As a student, I can recommend "Practical Electronics For Inventors, Fourth Edition" by Paul Scherz, accompanied by the occasional youtube video and reddit question :) You can buy it from Amazon here

I havent read any others, so I cant compare the quality, but you can go through it like a book and be able to understand everything. You may run into some problems in the real world that requires some fairly advanced calculus, which the book doesn't cover. (It does cover where to apply it, just not how). It is really extensive (1256 pages on my desktop e-reader), so if you have an idea for something specific you want to build, there might be something more efficient out there :)

I would think that not a lot of electronics books, if any, explain the math in full, so I would suggest that you find an online source for whatever specific piece of math you've run into. I can recommend Kahn academy.

Good luck :)

This is an awesome intro book to electronics. Covers all the basics, including how to read diagrams and identify components. Which is beyond important.

I prefer books because you can write with a pen into it. If you a good book to learn Arduino I advise you this one on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Arduino-Cookbook-Michael-Margolis/dp/1449313876/ref=sr_1_19?s=books-intl-de&ie=UTF8&qid=1507295426&sr=1-19&keywords=arduino+book&refinements=p_n_feature_three_browse-bin%3A4192709031

If you need some more projects or help you also can visit arduino.cc and go to the playground. There are some tutorials and projects with a building instructions.

If you also want to have a course than you should not take an online course, because the people there can't really see what you've builted, so they can't help you in some problems.

Sounds about right.

The book that got me into analog design literally has “art” in the title.

https://www.amazon.com/Science-Analog-Circuit-Design-Engineers/dp/0750670622/ref=nodl_?dplnkId=2efdb83e-c547-4916-8c42-8709c11ea061

Almost everything I know (and it's not that much believe me) comes from a couple of goods books on the subject (I recommend Practical Electronics for Inventors) and from YouTube (where I've watched every Ben Eater videos if you're into bare metal computing which I'm really fond of).

It's amazing what you can learn online theses days.

To answer your questions, the tool left of the soldering iron is Siglent SDS 1104 X-E 4 Channel Oscilloscope. It allows you to measure voltage across some very time interval. Perfect for measuring and studying the frequency, amplitude and shapes of waveforms. It's one of the most essential tool you can get after getting a decent multi-meter.

The other one on the far left is a FeelElec FY6900 Waveform Generator, think of it as a power supply for AC instead of DC. It can generate sine, square and trig waveform of varying frequency and amplitude. Let's say you want to build a full bridge rectifier which is a fun little beginner project. You'd use one of them to generate the AC current input.

All About Circuits has a pretty good primer for all things EE

Can also recommend the book Practical Electronics for Inventors by Sherz and Monk. Typically you'll see The Art of Electronics recommended as the bible of EE when it comes to books also.

I've got a book suggestion for you. There's probably some better ones out there but it's the one I happened to read recently.

Make: AVR Programming

I think it's exactly what you're talking about doing and does a decent job of holding your hand to get you started while still showing you exactly what's going on.

The way things are explained in the book easily translates to using other AVR chips.

It is truly the bible of electronics.
It's great but to start it's often a bit violent,
I advise you to read this one : https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Fourth-Scherz/dp/1259587541/ref=sr\_1\_1?crid=QBLGLJURDU5&keywords=inventor+for+electronic&qid=1664644736&s=books&sprefix=inventor+for+electronic%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C141&a...

If you like Maths and Circuits, look into embedded systems. Depending on how deep you want to go, you can work with circuits, maths (especially embedded is getting popular in AI, Digital Signal Processing etc etc). A lot of what you do here is low level and you dont always have the luxury of nice IDEs for e.g

I switched from a software engineer to embedded systems. I am currently doing my masters in it, I didn't enjoy software engineering. I always enjoyed tinkering with electronics as a kid, so this is something I really enjoy.

I do find it a bit more challenging, because my adhd makes it hard for me to read, a lot of embedded is going through pages and pages of datasheet, so that is kind of a bummer.

I would suggest you get a starter arduino kit or what I did was get this book: AVR Programming: Learning to Write Software for Hardware and an AVR programming kit, there are plenty of them, get a beginner one and then have a go at it, see if you enjoy it.

I love this book: Analog-Circuit-Design-Personalities-Engineers/dp/0750696400

Each chapter is written by a different legend of electrical engineering. They're completely broad in scope and they're so entertaining. My favorite chapter has nothing to do with electronics; it's a history of the evolution of precise clocks for navigation.

Physics major here who went on to also get a BSEE, so I'm probably uniquely qualified to understand your situation. In my physics program we covered the basics of electric circuits and had a circuits lab, but really stopped short of any actual circuit analysis. Unless you're an unusually motivated person, I think approaching this from the academic construct is going to be difficult. But, to answer your question anyway: - Circuits I: Intro to circuit analysis. Kirchoff's voltage and current laws, node and loop analysis, basic passive circuit elements, independent and dependent voltage and current sources, Bode plots, AC analysis, time domain representation of circuits, frequency domain / complex representations of circuits, Laplace transforms

• Circuits II: Diodes, operational amplifiers (black box), transistors. My course mostly focused on MOSFETS - DC analysis, small signal models, basic amplifier structures. Similar things for BJT, but less depth

• Analog and Digital Circuits: Intro to cascode amplifiers, high frequency amplifier analysis, more detail on amplifier configurations, 6T memory structures, inverters, digital rise/fall time / timing analysis, logic gate synthesis

Those were the basic courses. From there it was your choice in how much deeper you wanted to go.

In your case, I would probably pick up a hobbyist electronics book, like Practical Electronics for Inventors: https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Fourth-Scherz/dp/1259587541

In my opinion, the “Practical Electronics for Inventors” book does a pretty good job of explaining the fundamentals at an approachable level.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1259587541/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_D4FN7YETAEFRKC9V646J

> * Tu as appris en autodidacte, donc ? En mode pure pratique, ou as-tu des livres à conseiller ?

Niveau bouquins il y en a de très bons :
"Dépannages électriques domestiques". Super bien expliqué, excellents schémas. De façon générale tous les livres David Fedullo et Thierry Gallauziaux sont top pour le bricolage.
Sinon pour des connaissances électronique en général "Practical electronics for inventors".

Tbh, for me its a lot of reading/youtube. Guys like BigClive and AvE can teach a lot, and I can't recommend Practical Electronics for Inventors, Fourth Edition enough.

Since you are not using the arduino libraries I highly recommend this book. I use it for reference all these time

AVR Programming: Learning to Write Software for Hardware (Make: Technology on Your Time) https://www.amazon.com/dp/1449355781/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fabc_2V54V80BPRGZ8J37F2PS

An old opamp is a good place to start. These have readily available internal schematics (example), as opposed to more recent opamps that only have a rough block diagram in their datasheet.

Assuming you have a good understanding of circuits and transistors, (perhaps from self learning, an EE course, or from reading textbooks) you should find that the schematic breaks down into many easily recognisable circuit blocks such as current mirrors, etc.

Looking at the '741, you should be able to identify the parts that perform differential voltage gain at the input, voltage amplification, frequency compensation, class AB output stage, current limits for the output stage (both positive and negative), etc.

Some things may not be obvious, that are due to various limitations of the semiconductor processing of the day. Each generation of semiconductor processing had unique limitations that influenced the designs in different ways.
For the 741, this shows up in the input stage that has NPN emitter followers ahead of the actual differential amplifier using PNP transistors, even though the PNP transistors would be expected to have worse performance for this sort of thing. The reason for the use of PNP transistors is that the NPN emitter base reverse breakdown voltage is rather small (I guess 5-ish V?) compared to the large PNP breakdown voltage. (IIRC the 741 was the first mainstream opamp to allow large differential input voltages without blowing up, and this input stage design was the cause.)

one of my favorite references is practical electronics for inventors. it's just a great book to have for referencing all kinds of circuit ideas. Like the title suggests, it's about practical knowledge, so it's a little light on the theory.

Absolutely essential for CMIS 412, but I don't think that's part of the major requirements anymore. Otherwise you don't need to have a firm grasp for anything other than your own personal enrichment.

Anyways, if you want to learn what the class teaches, try picking up Beebop to the Boolean Boogie, which does a much better and more thorough job of covering the same stuff. I think it was actually listed as one of the "additional reading" things in one of the textbook sections, and I have found it enormously helpful.

I like this one; I borrowed it from the local library.

https://www.arrl.org/shop/Understanding-Basic-Electronics/

I bought this one but regret it; too much theory (for me at least) and slow to get through.

https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Electronics-Inventors-Fourth-Scherz/dp/1259587541

This book was an incredible resource for me: Practical Electronics for Inventors

I agree with others about kits and books being the way to go. To that, I'd add YouTube. Watch someone make something there. As for kits, I think there are basically two flavors: the experiments kit and the "make something specific" kit - like an amplifier. Both are great to start with. Whatever floats your boat.

As for books, Radio Shack used to have these little, hand-written-like books that I loved. Here's one on Amazon. How I loved those simple little books.

While it’s not a course, I totally recommend the book Practical Electronics for Inventors - is a great way to get the foundations.

Not sure exactly what you're asking, but Jim Williams - Art Science Personality might be what you're asking for? Jim Williams is a household name among analog engineers.

There was Schottkey's Traitorous Eight who founded Silicon Valley, there was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, there was the PayPal fiasco, but in between all that there was the artists who scienced the modern world. Bob Widlar, Bob Pease, Jim Williams, Paul Brokaw, Howard Johnson, and other inventors of the modern world.

There's also "Surely Youre Joking!" by Richard Feynman.

Hope those suggestions help?