I’m going through Floyd in a night course in solid state and like the book. It’s all there and will be a good reference one day. I’ve been reading Serda microelectronics and think highly of it. Art of Electronics has a quirky style that sometimes skip important information. It’s entertaining and if you can get through it, would give you a good foundation. I like the lab book a lot.

 

3 textbook authors, in particular, come to mind. Dr Paul Malvino, Thomas L Floyd, and Bernard Grob have all written comprehensive textbooks covering AC/DC theory, circuit analysis, solid-state devices and integrated circuits, digital electronics and others without going into calculus. There are many others also depending on the depth of mathematics and theory you are interested in. I find Floyd to be more hands-on and practical yet covers the material very well. YMMV

Just a bit of trivia. I'm pretty sure we used a highly recommended Grob book as a textbook back in the mid 1960s. Obviously current books will have been revised.

 

They actually publish Grob (and Floyd also) in 2 variations, Common Flow (ala Ben Franklin) and Electron Flow. Took me a bit to reorient my thinking to Electron Flow but now that's how I think of it even when reading a Common Flow book.

 

I waffle back and fourth on if I like these types of books or not. They are certainly not up to junior year engineering standards which are generally calculus heavy (I studied with Sedra and Smith for my undergrad), but they bring more practical knowledge than what S&S brings. Example: I had to learn how to read datasheets on my own.
Edit: My last paragraph is BS the more I think about it. I think junior year engineering schools should be teaching books out of something like this. I want new grads to have some practical knowledge - not a bunch of mathematics.

I'll both agree and disagree with you on this point. I definitely agree that engineering schools need to be teaching a lot more in the way of practical knowledge, but I disagree that they need to (or have to) forego the rigorous mathematics in the process. This is a situation in which, I believe, you can have your cake and eat it too. I believe that if a strong practical, hands-on focus were given to EE undergraduates that they would be in a much better position to grasp and appreciate the mathematics that underpins the theory of what they are studying. In fact, I believe that by providing that practical, hands-on experience the amount of time spent getting the theory drilled into them will go down enough that you can go even further with the material.

The problem, in my experience, is that the engineering schools (which means the faculty) are too wedded to the mantra of "we are educating engineers, not training technicians" as though the two groups are disjoint sets. A huge part of this false dichotomy is due to the high fraction of engineering faculty that have little to no real world engineering experience and have spent their entire career in the halls of academia. Sadly, this is true of a large fraction of the textbook authors, as well, so it's a self-propagating fallacy.

 

I believe I have posted about this before, but I recall in the 70's in Europe, when industrial electronics was starting to bloom, companies such as Siemens came to realize that there existed a gap between the journeyman and the engineer on the shop floor that could handle the necessary maintenance of electronic based manufacturing equipment, and to that end started instituting schools aimed at training Electronic technicians etc.
Max.
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I believe I have posted about this before, but I recall in the 70's in Europe, when industrial electronics was starting to bloom, companies such as Siemens came to realize that there existed a gap between the journeyman and the engineer on the shop floor that could handle the necessary maintenance of electronic based manufacturing equipment, and to that end started instituting schools aimed at training Electronic technicians etc.
Max.
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I'm speculating here, but I suspect that part of that gap was due to the increase in people going into engineering educations without coming up in any way from a practical background. While there have always been exceptions, it was common for people that chose to pursue an engineering degree to do so because they had reached a point in their professional life where that was what was needed to take their career to a higher level, not to start their career. So engineering programs were structured with that in mind, if not intentionally, then just as a reflection of their primary student body. The Post-WWII G.I. bill deserves a lot of the blame (if "blame" is the right word") for the shift as it dumped a lot of people with no prior experience in anything related into colleges in all sorts of programs and, not surprisingly, engineering programs adapted to make themselves amenable to such students (and the government money they brought with them). So these folks started graduating and entering the work force in the 1950 time frame plus the postwar economic boom allowed kids to go straight from high school to college in unprecedented numbers. So go another twenty years down the road and they and the ones that followed them are now the bulk of the engineers on payroll and most of the engineers with a strong practical background are now retiring or moving into senior positions that take them off the shop floor.

Of course, that speculation is focused on the situation in the U.S., but I suspect that similar things were happening in Europe, as well.

Also, don't get me wrong. I think the Post-WWII G.I. bill did a lot of good. It was primarily intended to prevent the dumping of soldiers back into the civilian job market at a time when the economy was contracting and restructuring from a war footing to a piece footing and from displacing the huge numbers of women that had stepped up and filled those roles. I think a very positive unintended consequence was the explosion of the numbers of highly educated people in all kinds of fields into the workforce. I don't think we would have gotten to the moon if it weren't for the G.I. Bill and everything that sprang from it. But, like nearly anything, I think it had its negative unintended consequences, too.

 

I always wanted our E&I Techs to have access to the PLC programming and made sure they had a laptop with the software and cabling to plug into the PLCs for diagnostic purposes and knew how to use it to scan the I/O. They are your first line of defense. When something stops working they call the shift electrician who they know very well and not the engineer who designed it and who may not even be still employed or was a contractor. That's one side of the coin. The other side was the jackass that decided to protect his job and boost his call-in pay by putting his own personal password protection on the PLC software so HE would have to be the only one who could be called in to diagnose the problem by scanning the software. Ah well... Trials and Tribulations of being the Plant Maintenance Supervisor (which I was not). Most of the hard schooling for our guys was in the military (not in trade schools) which is why personnel gave due credit to military MOS technical training when hiring techs. I wish our E&I Techs had more training and regular ongoing training instead of just on the job hands-on do or die kind. But then that costs money...

 

I'll both agree and disagree with you on this point. I definitely agree that engineering schools need to be teaching a lot more in the way of practical knowledge, but I disagree that they need to (or have to) forego the rigorous mathematics in the process. This is a situation in which, I believe, you can have your cake and eat it too. I believe that if a strong practical, hands-on focus were given to EE undergraduates that they would be in a much better position to grasp and appreciate the mathematics that underpins the theory of what they are studying. In fact, I believe that by providing that practical, hands-on experience the amount of time spent getting the theory drilled into them will go down enough that you can go even further with the material.

The problem, in my experience, is that the engineering schools (which means the faculty) are too wedded to the mantra of "we are educating engineers, not training technicians" as though the two groups are disjoint sets. A huge part of this false dichotomy is due to the high fraction of engineering faculty that have little to no real world engineering experience and have spent their entire career in the halls of academia. Sadly, this is true of a large fraction of the textbook authors, as well, so it's a self-propagating fallacy.

Thought provoking discussion - and since it's already off into the weeds - I'll contine.

Like I said, I waffle back and fourth. I'm one of those EE's that started their undergrad (class of '07) without any practical knowledge. It's a long story, but I'll keep it short by saying that music, electrical guitars, recording studios, poor pay, and the desire to eat got me into engineering. I entered engineering with some knowledge of signal-flow, amplifiers, and filters. I had never taken apart an amp or 'stomp-box' because they were too expensive and dangerous (in the case of a guitar amp) to risk opening them and not getting them back together.

As a result, I had to learn everything in my undergrad. Things as simple as a resistance, capacitance, and inductance were new concepts to me. I had to learn it all. Eventually after I graduated and went into aerospace I realized quickly that I didn't ever learn to read a transistor datasheet. Instead, in my junior year I learned to calculate the i-v curves of a transistor based on concepts that simply aren't used in everyday practice. For MOSFETs, process transconductance (k'n), trench width and length (W/L), and threshold voltages (Vt) were considered. Imagine my shock the first time I went to analyze a real transistor circuit and k'n and W/L were not specified in the datasheet! Forget having any inherent knowledge of how to quickly identify what's happening in a transistor circuit! These were all skills that I had to develop on the job - and in a hurry!

Did my undergrad set me up for success? IDK. I have been successful, but my personal drive, work ethic, luck, and the brilliant and patient people I've had around me have had a lot to do with it also! Having my BSEE has certainly opened doors that would have been closed otherwise. I certainly don't think deriving transistor i-v curves have helped me at all. And that's just one example.

 

I had one of our Project Engineering Managers make the comment that the degree only showed that you were smarter than the ones who didn't graduate and had not much to do with engineering. But that smart guys made good engineers. But from my experience, there were a lot of young guys we hired right out of school that were pretty stupid and never did get it as an engineer. They moved on pretty quickly. The "Peter Principle" comes to mind.

 

I had one of our Project Engineering Managers make the comment that the degree only showed that you were smarter than the ones who didn't graduate and had not much to do with engineering. But that smart guys made good engineers. But from my experience, there were a lot of young guys we hired right out of school that were pretty stupid and never did get it as an engineer. They moved on pretty quickly. The "Peter Principle" comes to mind.

Agreed. When I worked at Lockheed the joke was that "The really good ones leave, and the bad ones are shown the door (eventually)." The company had a very hard time keeping new-grad engineers over 5 years for a host of reasons. I left after 8. I tried to leave after 6, but found that my skill set was too specialized. About that time I also had an opportunity to design a circuit board that was destined for Mars. I took the opportunity (that was a no brainer!), delivered the hardware, and easily found a better job afterwards.

Getting back to the education system - I now find that the things I'm interested in doing are so advanced that nobody else is doing them. I'm currently going back to school for my MS to learn a few more things. The education system has changed a lot in 12 years! Nobody wants to offer thesis based MS's anymore. They want to gravy train 'Professional MS's' with international students. The ProMS's are highly practical curriculums that I do think are valuable to green engineers to be more productive once they hit industry, but for a real professional with 12 years experience already, I find at least some of the content dull. I'm trying to find my way into a thesis based MS as a result, but so far it's been hard - even with my resume - and it's stacked.

 

Anyone else here consider this to be the best overall book on the subject?

I have it, I've read it. I don't know that it's the best, as I haven't read all the books there are to read on Electronics. What stands out to me about AoE is the authors are trying to change the perspective- they want people actually understand what's going on, so that they can fairly accurately guestimate how to design a circuit or how to read a schematic. 'Back of the hand'. Which means not that you're lazy or unwilling to be accurate, but rather your understanding is great enough that you know when that decimal point matters and when it doesn't. When 1mA will do and when 10mA is needed. Not because someone else said so, but because you actually understand.

There is no -one- book that is best. Frankly, if you want to be really good, you should read everything on everything you're interested in, until your knowledge is such that you no longer need to read some-one else's stuff about something. IMHO. I think some of the most valuable writings on electronics are Ohm's Law, Tesla's work, Kirchhoff, and Thevenin.

And for anyone starting:

Title: Understanding Basic Electronics, 1st Ed.
Publisher: The American Radio Relay League
ISBN: 0-87259-398-3

 

Thought provoking discussion - and since it's already off into the weeds - I'll contine.

Like I said, I waffle back and fourth. I'm one of those EE's that started their undergrad (class of '07) without any practical knowledge. It's a long story, but I'll keep it short by saying that music, electrical guitars, recording studios, poor pay, and the desire to eat got me into engineering. I entered engineering with some knowledge of signal-flow, amplifiers, and filters. I had never taken apart an amp or 'stomp-box' because they were too expensive and dangerous (in the case of a guitar amp) to risk opening them and not getting them back together.

As a result, I had to learn everything in my undergrad. Things as simple as a resistance, capacitance, and inductance were new concepts to me. I had to learn it all. Eventually after I graduated and went into aerospace I realized quickly that I didn't ever learn to read a transistor datasheet. Instead, in my junior year I learned to calculate the i-v curves of a transistor based on concepts that simply aren't used in everyday practice. For MOSFETs, process transconductance (k'n), trench width and length (W/L), and threshold voltages (Vt) were considered. Imagine my shock the first time I went to analyze a real transistor circuit and k'n and W/L were not specified in the datasheet! Forget having any inherent knowledge of how to quickly identify what's happening in a transistor circuit! These were all skills that I had to develop on the job - and in a hurry!

Did my undergrad set me up for success? IDK. I have been successful, but my personal drive, work ethic, luck, and the brilliant and patient people I've had around me have had a lot to do with it also! Having my BSEE has certainly opened doors that would have been closed otherwise. I certainly don't think deriving transistor i-v curves have helped me at all. And that's just one example.

I can't argue with much of this -- I agree with it strongly. In most aspects I was similar, other than I had some rather superficial (though it seemed much deeper at the time) level of experience with electronic systems by means of learning enough to put in fairly extensive dual battery system and secondary electrical system in my truck. Learned about diodes and LEDs by way of finding hacks to accomplish what I wanted. Learned a bit more in passing when in the military, but since my specialization was hydraulics and not electrics, that was all peripheral and came about by necessity or accident. So when I went back to college for my degree I couldn't claim much more background or experience that most of the students; what I did have -- which shockingly most engineering students didn't seem to and that's even more pervasive these days -- is a real interest and passion for learning, understanding, and using the stuff they were being taught. I couldn't get enough of it and was constantly doing stuff outside of class to explore it in more detail. Fortunately I had a handful of professors that had significant industry experience and so they helped me along on numerous occasions by showing me information in the datasheet that was important or challenging me to better identify what was important and what wasn't in a circuit I was working on. I also learned a ton of stuff by all the mistakes and poor choices and overlooked considerations I made in those side projects -- like the fact that the quiz bowl systems I designed in my junior year drew enough current that I needed to replace the 9 V batteries after every round!

One thing that I didn't realize until I was a grad student was the disparity between the physics programs (and students) and the engineering programs (and students). I took a lot of classes from the engineering department but didn't realize the degree to which the practical side of my education was coming almost exclusively from the physics department's curriculum. I think I viewed both sides as somehow working together in an orchestrated way (boy, was that ever a naive notion!). When I became a grad student in the engineering program exclusively, I was confronted with just how little most engineering students actually had any interest for engineering; the vast majority of physics students had a passion for learning physics and it showed in so many ways, but far too many of the engineering students were only interested in getting a piece of paper that declared them to be engineers.

On a side note regarding your comments about MOSFET parameters, I too wish that engineering education included more of a focus on parameters of importance to practical circuits and how to get that information from the datasheets, but I'll also point out that the while most of the physical parameters you mention (such as W/L) are not to be found in datasheets that is not because they aren't important, but just because you have no control over them when you are using prepackaged transistors. When you design integrated circuits you do have control over many of them and so they become pretty central to your design efforts. Any educational program is going to contain elements that are important to some specializations and not important to others.

EDIT: Cleaned up a couple typos.

 

Keep in mind AoE does a decent job of addressing the formulas but its not the focus (such as the explanation about current mirrors and the details about Boltzmann constants..etc.) I see this book as more of a practical explanation of electronics with more of a hands on approach rather than a step by step text book that’s designed to progressively get you through your BSEE. It’s the book you want to use while poking around on a breadboard... the lab book has some great exercises building up to a discrete opamp and beyond.

I‘m in a refresher course going through Floyd’s book and although MOSFETs are in the book, by the time you get through BJTs you’ve been given so many formulas it’s hard to keep them straight... no Im not memorizing all of them. Then quickly through amplifiers, differential, filters and it’s just too much. So although there’s a little time spent of JFET, MOSFETs are just glossed over. The formulas are there if you need it. I wish we could have spent a couple weeks just on diodes. It’s really not long enough to get intimate knowledge... there’s still so much to cover. Next semesters will be opamps with a section on regulators and even logic/programming not sure why a chapter on that. I hope we skip it.

For signal amplification it seems like BJT are favored due to their linear IV curve. It would be interesting to play with depletion MOS for signal amplifier with zero bias at gate... but I think that those days are over with opamps.

this class could easily span 4 semesters.

the other observation I found was that the professor favors BJT including IGBT over MOSFET for high voltage and current switching. Things change so fast in our world and at some point transconductance issues with MOSFETs show itself but there is continued research. I favor mosfets but maybe because I’m really saturating more than amplifying most times.

 

I know this thread is about electronics books, with a little side diversion of education, but I want to make a comment about the latter.

The same thing happened in IT. The first issue depended the institution. At first, a computer science program was an offset of EE; only later was software taught. And then it was taught because computers were the new plastic!

After many years in IT, people trained at a computer school were marginally better than those without such training. But the best likely were self-taught. IMHO many software advances came about because someone didn’t understand what had came before. So they invent “new” stuff.

 

I started out in Project Engineering but because I was eventually working with "Computer Controlled" Distributed Control Systems as a Process Control Engineer I ended up in the IT department working for the IT Manager who was a Ga Tech EE who had worked for IBM in the 60-70s. Yes, he had development and computer hardware knowledge dealing with computers but had no idea what Process Control and Instrumentation was. You NEVER stopped learning especially since the hardware and operating systems had such a short life cycle. We spent 2 weeks/year offsite taking various courses. I got saddled with a PDP 11-44 based DCS that by the time I got to it, it was becoming horribly outdated and difficult to even find parts for to keep it running since they hadn't been manufactured for many years and had to depend on rebuilt parts. I did replace/upgrade the front end but was stuck with antiquated racks of analog/digital interface boards to the field instruments. For that very reason, we were started going through GE Capital and leasing systems. Both DCS and the Plant IT systems. That forced the upkeep into the operating areas budgets instead of the "Oh well we don't have money to do that this year." Which caused enormous support headaches and downtime thinking well it's working now isn't it so why spend money on it. Electronics and Computer Hardware/Software are not static.

 

On a side note regarding your comments about MOSFET parameters, I too wish that engineering education included more of a focus on parameters of importance to practical circuits and how to get that information from the datasheets, but I'll also point out that the while most of the physical parameters you mention (such as W/L) are not to be found in datasheets that is not because they aren't important, but just because you have no control over them when you are using prepackaged transistors. When you design integrated circuits you do have control over many of them and so they become pretty central to your design efforts. Any educational program is going to contain elements that are important to some specializations and not important to others.

I agree that we're generally in agreement.

The rabbit hole goes deeper. I recently started grad school. Guess what? Most schools are really pushing online grad school and 'ProEE' degrees that are not thesis based, but more of a practical education to supplement an undergraduate degree. I recall recently being told by the graduate advisor that of the ~350 grad students at my state school, ~3 are in a thesis-based MSEE. The ProEE is really not for professionals, but for international students that want a better education than what their home country offers. Professionals in the ProEE curriculum generally have to quit their jobs to keep up and do a lot of remedial tasks that they've probably done 100 times. I spent most of last semester doing 8051 based programming with introductions to I2C, SPI, Parallel Ports, etc. Yawn. This is stuff you can watch a few youtube videos on and have a pretty good idea of what you're doing. Don't get me wrong, it's a great course for people that haven't had practical exposure to this stuff, but it's pretty boring intellectually for a real professional with 12 years of electronics experience.

I'm working on getting into the thesis-based MSEE program. The school doesn't really want me there though because it's not that profitable for them, and it takes more time of the professors.

 

I can understand the boredom with remedial tasks. I never got my MSZ degree for a variety of reasons, but one was that the work for a computer science or MIS degree was boring. I had been active in the field for almost a decade and I knew more than the instructors. This was late 60s and early 70s.

 

I agree that we're generally in agreement.

The rabbit hole goes deeper. I recently started grad school. Guess what? Most schools are really pushing online grad school and 'ProEE' degrees that are not thesis based, but more of a practical education to supplement an undergraduate degree. I recall recently being told by the graduate advisor that of the ~350 grad students at my state school, ~3 are in a thesis-based MSEE. The ProEE is really not for professionals, but for international students that want a better education than what their home country offers. Professionals in the ProEE curriculum generally have to quit their jobs to keep up and do a lot of remedial tasks that they've probably done 100 times. I spent most of last semester doing 8051 based programming with introductions to I2C, SPI, Parallel Ports, etc. Yawn. This is stuff you can watch a few youtube videos on and have a pretty good idea of what you're doing. Don't get me wrong, it's a great course for people that haven't had practical exposure to this stuff, but it's pretty boring intellectually for a real professional with 12 years of electronics experience.

I'm working on getting into the thesis-based MSEE program. The school doesn't really want me there though because it's not that profitable for them, and it takes more time of the professors.

"Don't get me wrong, it's a great course for people that haven't had practical exposure to this stuff"

This is a telling statement. That we even can make a statement like this about a MASTERS level program with a straight face says a lot about the glaring deficiencies of so many undergraduate programs. But that's were we are.

 

"Don't get me wrong, it's a great course for people that haven't had practical exposure to this stuff"

This is a telling statement. That we even can make a statement like this about a MASTERS level program with a straight face says a lot about the glaring deficiencies of so many undergraduate programs. But that's were we are.

Please don't get the wrong idea. The course was very good, just not good for someone of my skill level. The course was also very much a master's level course (read: challenging technically for everyone at times, including myself). It's also just one course of many available to the students. I fully expect courses further along in the curriculum to be more challenging for both myself and the other students.

The better students coming out of the ProMS program get jobs at Apple, Intel, Amazon, SpaceX, Lockheed, Boeing, and other very respected companies, so the school has got to be doing something right!

I'm actually really glad I took the course for reasons hard to describe in words. Let's just say I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't taken the course.

 

When this first came out I was not impressed, especially at that price! But I think it is probably helpful for those new to electronics. I gives them a starting place and is a practical reference.