Comment by blagie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blagie | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Art of Electronics is popular but kind of horrible.

1) At the level you can understand it, you don't need it. There are better, more in-depth, shorter books.

1) At the level you can't, it's incomprehensible. You'll run into a brick wall.

It's hard to recommend something without knowing background, but to do electronics well, you need to know basic linear algebra and differential equations, and understand (at least on a cursory level) the Laplace domain. You also need to be comfortable with poles, zeros, and rational functions.

That's a high bar. The most common mistake I see is trying to get further without being over that bar. Below that, you have popular books, many cartoonish, which explain what voltage and current are and the basic components. That's enough to do some basic Arduino projects and robotics, but not really get what's going on more deeply.

Above that bar, there are much more in-depth and theoretical approaches one is ready for the Art of Electronics.

Horowitz and Hill tries to compress that stuff down, toss in a bunch of oddball topics, and it doesn't really work.

I wouldn't call it "horrible" -- many of the explanations are good and there's a lot of practical advice. But it is worth noting that AoE is an electronics book, not a circuit analysis textbook or a signals and systems textbook. The brief review in the first chapter is just that -- a review. If you want to develop a deeper intuition about how voltages and currents behave in electrical circuits, you'll have to look elsewhere.

The problem is that learning one hinges on the other, and you can't understand the practical at the depth AoE goes into without first understanding the theory.

Someone in the thread mentioned it was designed for physicists. It might be okay there. That's a kind of unique background where someone might understand the theory without the application. However, most of the time I've seen it used, it's a recipe for frustration.

Do you have any suggestion for a good book on the math topics you mentioned, to get myself above the bar?

It's a long hike. Where are you starting from?

brilliant.org has decent courses on linear algebra, including nodal analysis ($100/year or so). You don't need to know a lot; you do need to know how to express a linear equation as a matrix and solve with row reduction, and eventually, how to apply that to nodal analysis.

alcumus and AoPS textbooks are pretty adequate for rational functions, complex numbers, roots-of-unity, etc. You should know everything in their intermediate algebra and precalculus textbook (and ideally, their title textbooks: AoPS Volume 1 and 2). These aren't too long, are much more advanced than normal high school curricula, and are worth doing in either case, skipping the parts you know. Next step is something like MIT 6.302 OCW, which is brilliant.

For differential equations and Laplace, any differential equations textbook will be adequate. I would not do a deep dive here. A shallow one will more than suffice. If you kind-of-get-it, that's good enough.

If you lack calculus background for this dive, OSU MOOCulus or AoPS Calculus are good places to go. OSU will be easy, step-by-step, and AoPS will be challenging, so it depends on your background.

For most people, this takes 2-4 years, and you can't really cram it (which is both good and bad news; a little time each day is almost as good as learning full-time here; you can read about the spacing effect).

Couldn’t disagree more strongly, but you’re welcome to your opinion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com