favourite technical books

[temperance]

Simple question: what are your favourite technical books and why?

Mine:
Crenshaw: Math-toolkit-for-real-time-programming. An interesting book about building integrator and differentiators on small 8bit micro controllers with a sense of humour.
(a free version can be downloaded from some website. But I 'don't know if I can post a link here.)

Sedra Smith: microelectronic circuits.
Well known to must of you for those who still play around with bare transistors. A compact, dense and to the point book. More modern books are boring, heavy and half of the pages could be left out because they contain to much useless illustrations.

Jasper J goedbloed: electromagnetic compatibility. A relative unknown but extremely valuable book about EMC. A good mix between theory and practice. I guard my copy like a dog.

[exe]

Mine is AoE3 (plus X-chapters), but I'm looking for more reading like this. I've read "current sources voltage references", it was also enjoyable reading, though not sure I want to re-read it.

[jasonRF]

"favorite" shifts around depending on what I am interested in at the time.  But the books I have probably used the most over the past 25-30 years are

Probability, random variables and stochastic processes, 2nd edition, by Papoulis

Fields and waves in communication electronics, 2nd edition, by Ramo, Whinnery and Van Duzer

Perhaps not the world's best books, but they have wide scope so include a ton of topics.  Both are falling apart from years of use. 

jason

[Infraviolet]

I too can recommend the Art of Electronics (Horowitz and Hill), but I haven't read the x-chapter supplemental book yet.

The truth thesedays though is that an awful lot of topics are more quickly looked up online than in books, not so good for overviews of topics as books are, but easier for searching for one narrow thing. Ofcourse browing is easier in a book, especially if you don't know what the search term would be to find some specific thing online.

[tautech]

Tek OSCILLOSCOPE PROBE CIRCUITS
120 pages of goodness:
https://w140.com/tekwiki/images/6/62/062-1146-00.pdf

[Stray Electron]

  All of those Tek books are well worth reading.

[David Hess]

The three, or four depending on how you count, Linear Technology Application Handbooks are my favorites.  They are followed by the Analog Circuit Design books edited by Jim Williams.  And do not forget Troubleshooting Analog Circuits and Analog Circuits (World Class Designs) by Robert Pease.

After those, my collection of electronics books gets esoteric with things like sampling.

[Alex Eisenhut]

GE Transistor Manual, 1960s vintage. And its cousin the GE SCR Manual. I guess the RCA series on transistors is also pretty good.
Microelectronics Packaging, Sideris, 1960s.

Not so much because any of it is terribly relevant today, but for the history. I just have a thing for the 1960s. The sense of optimism and creating the future, I don't know, I like it.

And yeah the Tek series are great, even better if you can get them in print for extra vintage goodness.

[tautech]

And yeah the Tek series are great, even better if you can get them in print for extra vintage goodness.

Crying   :'(  <----no longer works !
I had OSCILLOSCOPE PROBE CIRCUITS in top condition acquired from ePay a decade or more ago but it disappeared without trace which I'm still a little upset about (more  :'(). After looking high and low for much longer than its worth it was never found and I only imagine it got placed atop a pile of magazines that got recycled.   

Shortly after it was found available online  and someone also uploaded it to Tekwiki  where we can all have a copy now. 

[temperance]

Thanks for the Tek oscilloscope probe circuits book.

The GE Transistor Manual is available in Archive:
https://archive.org/details/GE_-_Transistor_Manual_1964

[armandine2]

useful, well laid out, and kept (revered?)

[PlainName]

Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder.

[Sal Ammoniac]

The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

[Benta]

"An Engineering Approach to Digital Design", William I. Fletcher.
"Video Demystified!, Keith Jack.

Fletcher is a must, unless you only work with analog (rare these days). The second only if you work with video.

[jonpaul]

Great posts!

BRAVO! Many old favs in the thread.

Just a few from several bookcases, back to college 19680s..

Selected: transformers/Magnetics, analog/sync, EMI/Noise/

Happy to have your thoughts!


Jon

[temperance]

@ jonpaul

nice. The "power line filter design for switch mode power supplies" is available for only €251. Bummer. I'll give you ten euro's including postage. Only valid today.

[Benta]

Just musing...
Are all you guys aware of the value of the books on your shelves?
Many are out of print, and many are still available, but they all still cost 50...150$ apiece.
And they're of a quality (content-wise) that no web site can match.
My message to good engineers: "Put your money where your mouth is" and take care of and extend your library... and leave the "allaboutcircuits" websites to the amateurs.
EEVBlog excepted, of course, because here's where the owners, and more importantly: readers) of those books are present.

[PlainName]

but they all still cost 50...150$ apiece

They might be like Ebay items - that's the notional price the vendor wants to sell them for, but is anyone buying them at that price?

[temperance]

@ Benta

I'm not sure how much I money I spent on technical books. But a lot. The last one I bought was Basso's Linear circuit transfer functions. Expensive but well worth the money.

Also, a good time to scan second hand websites for books is around January/February when some students choose to pursue an other career. That's how I obtained a few books on VHDL for almost nothing.

[jonpaul]

Entire library
more favorite categories.
Historic rare books
BSTJ 1948, 1949 with 3 papers by Shannon and a few about the transistor.
Claude Shannon 1st ed Mathematical Theory of Communications systems 1949

Tektronix Circuits Concerps orig circa 1970s..1980s.
Almost complete set....
From TEK local rep.

Very rare!
Enjoy,

Jon

[Benta]

They might be like Ebay items - that's the notional price the vendor wants to sell them for, but is anyone buying them at that price?

Yes.

[David Aurora]

Anything by Bob Pease or Jim Williams. They just got straight to the point with the practical knowledge so you could walk to the bench and get things done. The epitome of the concept that a real expert can explain their wisdom to a 5 year old.

Kind of the opposite approach of the much hyped AOE thing to me. Every now and then I pick it up to reference something and within 5 minutes I'm just like "Fuck it, there's probably an app note from Williams on this subject somewhere" and I put it down for another year.

[pdenisowski]

Are all you guys aware of the value of the books on your shelves?
Many are out of print, and many are still available, but they all still cost 50...150$ apiece.
And they're of a quality (content-wise) that no web site can match.
My message to good engineers: "Put your money where your mouth is" and take care of and extend your library...

Agree completely. 

I was recently trying to find a copy of Helszajn's "YIG Resonators and Filters" (1985) and could not find one for sale anywhere worldwide, at any price.  It's one of the "standard" references listed in many books, IEEE articles, etc. on YIG, but it appears to have become commercially unobtainable.  (My local university library supposedly has a copy)

[pdenisowski]

but they all still cost 50...150$ apiece

They might be like Ebay items - that's the notional price the vendor wants to sell them for, but is anyone buying them at that price?

Ebay (and Amazon) often suggest pricing based on what other people have paid for the same or similar items in the past: it's getting much harder to find "deals" on used books these days because now everyone is an expert on book values   Even some thrift shops now scan donated books to see which ones are worth more than a few dollars and those then get listed online (at "market" prices) instead of sold in the store with the romance and cowboy novels.

And yeah, 50-150 USD for a technical book is not uncommon at all.  I do a lot of "research" for my job and if a book could save me significant time trying to find information, it's well worth it.  I recently was working on a project where I found some extremely useful information in a book that's been out of print for decades.

[tautech]

One I often borrowed in the early days especially when undertaking one's right of passage building your first PSU:
National Semiconductor, Voltage Regulator Handbook and IIRC the 1982 version

Some darn useful references for rectifier, smoothing and of course common regulator designs albeit they are ordinary linear designs and by todays standards dated yet still of great guidance for the electronic newbie.
ePay search showing a few versions:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=national+semiconductor+voltage+regulator+handbook+1982&_svsrch=1