The Art of Electronics 3rd edition - author response

[IonizedGears]

So what extra things do they have in the third edition?

[solarmist]

Since the author is advocating keeping 2nd edition around I'd assume that just about everything is new or different.

[ablacon64]

That would be interesting, all new material complementing the second edition.

[IntegratedValve]

And when is the 3rd edition coming out? If there's no official date set that shows on major sellers or publisher site, then it's mirage, just to keep people going with the current edition.

[Smokey]

TAoE bump.
Happy Early Mid-2014!
Duke Nukem Forever made it.... TAoE can to!!  Keep the hope alive!

[Tris20]

TAoE bump.
Happy Early Mid-2014!
Duke Nukem Forever made it.... TAoE can to!!  Keep the hope alive!

Funny, I had EXACLTY the same thought yesterday but just didn't post it. Mainly because of the similarities between the hype of both and the massive disappointment I'm now anticipating.

[Legion]

Meh. 2nd edition is fine. It's not like anything significant has changed since the 80s. My TRS-80 is still top of the line!

[solarmist]

I've emailed about the status of the book and will send an update when I hear back.

[solarmist]

I got a response from Winfield today.

 

For the last several months we have been going over
 the 1400 figures, which were drafted in India.  We're
 editing them in Adobe Illustrator, and are 75% done.
 Then, after a last pass on text edits, we'll be making
 the index.  This involves thinking of all the alternate
 words blokes use to describe the same thing.  About
 that time CUP will start doing the page layout.  Then
 we'll have a galley proof to study and approve.

Looking on wikipedia Galley Proofs are limited runs used for proof reading and sometimes advance copies, so that should be the final step before mass publication. 

That said it sounds like there's a minimum of months of work remaining, but it does sound like less than six months of work to my, untrained, ears, so I'd expect to hear a real release date in about five or six months or shortly after (since people are horrible at estimates and always underestimate everything). 

I'd give a couple more months for reviewing the remaining figures, a few weeks for a last editing pass, and couple of months for the index, then a few weeks, maybe a month or two for proofreading. Then production would start and that would take a minimum of a few weeks to a couple months to build stock.

One article I found on Chronicle of Higher Education described hand building his index (completely after the fact) in a month. I'd expect some of this work to be done already and this to be a much large work, I'd expect two months there.

[Stephen Durr]

I wonder if there will be also a revised student manual to accompany the 3rd Ed. ?

[matrixofdynamism]

I find it troubling to see that such an important book could take so long to be revised.

[lapm]

I just digged up my second edition of this book... Still rocks... But i'm so going to buy third one once its published... This book got me throw my engineering electronics stuff when i was in school still..

[MDG]

This from the Fall 2014 course information document on the Physics 123 home page http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~thayes/phys123/

"Texts: None to Buy
We should say that new editions of the texts that we use in this course are due in about a year (and always have been!). So, you may want to shop for a used copy of the big book—then buy the hot new editions in 2015?"

(Physics 123 used to be taught by Paul Horowitz and is apparently now taught by Tom Hayes, who has been a co-instructor for the course since at least the first edition of Art of Electronics and is a co-author on the second edition of the lab manual.)

[nctnico]

I find it troubling to see that such an important book could take so long to be revised.

Important? Only wannabee engineers and managers have the AoE book. There is too little information on any subject to be useful for designing a real circuit. It might be interesting to look for buzz-words on how to tackle a certain problem but this website and Google do that just fine nowadays.

[rolycat]

I find it troubling to see that such an important book could take so long to be revised.

Important? Only wannabee engineers and managers have the AoE book.

Given that most engineers start out as 'wannabees', presumably there is a ceremonial burning of the book when one qualifies?

(Feeling combative since GeoffS locked the entertaining British Wall Socket thread  )

[Corporate666]

I find it troubling to see that such an important book could take so long to be revised.

Why?  It's not like Win is obligated to work on this book at a rate that satisfies anonymous people on the internet.  Maybe he enjoys spending time with his family.  Maybe he has lots of other work commitments.  Maybe the book is just a labor of love for him and he works on it when he has the time and motivation to.

I can't understand why people are bugging Win about this and/or drawing any inferences from the schedule.  It will be done when it's done, and if people choose to buy it once it's done - then they can buy it (or not, if they don't want to).

[GK]

(Feeling combative since GeoffS locked the entertaining British Wall Socket thread  )

I didn't even get an opportunity to bring up Gallipoli.

[solarmist]

Mr Hill doesn't seem to mind me sending an email once or twice a year, he's never been anything but excited and nice to me.

That said here's the most recent email between us.

Hi Mr. Hill,

I was just thinking it'd be nice to get the new edition for Christmas
and thought I'd send an email to see if that was realistic. Any chance
of seeing this on shelves this year? Or is page layout, indexing and
galley proofing still in process?  Or have I complete messed up how
long things take in publishing a book this size?

 Tell me about it!  Right now we're going through the
 book fixing errors.  We're still few weeks away from
 starting on the indexing, after that comes the page
 layout and then the galleys to inspect.

 They're telling us it may be on the streets by spring.

This is the first time he's mentioned an actual publish date coming back from the publishers, so that's good news, but he's been very optimistic every time I've talked to him, so I'd expect closer to summer or maybe even the fall date Amazon.ca is guessing at, but we're down to only three items left on the check list: Indexing, Layout and Proofing.  So I do think next fall is likely an upper limit on the work left. 

That said the last six months have been spent almost exclusively on fixing errors, so I certainly can't be confident in any predictions. 

Indexing is a large difficult project, but probably not the size of editing and fixing error in the entire volume, so my guess is probably around 3 months or so.
Layout isn't huge deal normally, but this is a huge project so I'd expect it to take as long as indexing.  If the authors aren't doing this themselves then it can be done concurrently with indexing. This article says it takes about a month to layout a normal book. http://www.stevenpressfield.com/2012/10/why-it-takes-so-long-to-publish-a-book/. So maybe another three months for this tome.
Galley Proofs are the final approval of pages and last minute typo catches, so I'd expect another month or so.
Finally they have to do the actual print run and plan a release.  I really hope they just push this through and do it in like a month to get it out.

That puts it at around 5-9 months of additional work left.

[Smokey]

Hah!  Let me know when I should start holding my breath....

[solarmist]

One more update I asked about.

Are you doing the layout yourselves or will that be happening
concurrently with indexing?

 The layout is a difficult and time-intensive process,
 and requires a special knowledge of LaTEX code, so
 it's being done by a professional team at CUG.  (We
 get to look at it in a follow-on approval step.)  They
 require that the index is finished before they start.
 We questioned that (the index doesn't need layout)
 for a minute, but then we realized that in re-reading
 the book to make the index, we're likely to see more
 important changes, so we keep quiet about the policy

So, it looks like it'll be on the longer side of my guess.  Next summer or fall seems realistic.

[T3sl4co1l]

Yikes... I've written a small, paper really, in LaTeX, with index, and it's easier to do it while you're writing... leaving it until the end is

Tim

[MicroHex]

So, uh, maybe it's just on Amazon Canada, but....

http://www.amazon.ca/dp/0521809266/

Yeah, appears to have a listing. If it's real, I do hope the 1980->1989->2015 isn't setting up a trend curve for the 4th edition.

[solarmist]

So Winfield tried to edit Wikipedia, but because they won't allow primary source they reverted it.  Here it is for your reference.

Winfield here: Please hold off, we're looking at March 2015 (or maybe a bit later).  But I'm sure you'll be very pleased with the result.  We've massively re-written the book, with all kinds of useful new material, including bench measurements, etc.  We're talking someplace between 15 and 20 man-years in this new book.  Plus we've created an advanced follow-on book, called the x chapters, but sorry, you'll have to wait a bit for that to come out.

[Smokey]

So Winfield tried to edit Wikipedia, but because they won't allow primary source they reverted it.

This is just stupid.  So if he had written that on his own site, then someone could have edited the wikipedia page to say:

"Quoting Winfield's site................"

Would that have been OK?

[T3sl4co1l]

Or for that matter, now that it's on this forum, it can be referred to here.  As long as it exists somewhere *other* than Wikipedia, that's all they care about.