The wide margins remind me of university coursebooks.

What I want is a paperback where the margins are chosen such that you can read the text when you fold back the facing part of the book.

It can get hard to follow after a while :)

How about a triple-play, damning with damn damnation?

Congratulations, you are now quoted on the page!

Baskerville's fine. Bland, but fine.

Why in the world would you write something like that. Genuinely, what good does this do, other than hurt people?

as someone coming from software I find learning electronics pretty hard as it requires a completely different mental model and way to approach systems

I went from electronics to software and one thing that has puzzled me is how much people dislike reading docs as in reference manuals. People can get by with sloppy code full of hidden bugs and when those bugs arise they’re like deers frozen by headlights.

Imagine building a circuit without any ideas how it operates. I’ve encountered web devs that don’t understand how http works.

Also as a person who came to Embedded/Electronics from the Software side, i found the following incredibly useful to bridge the software-hardware gap using MCUs;

1) Introduction to Embedded Systems: Using Microcontrollers and the MSP430 by Manuel Jiménez, Rogelio Palomera, Isidoro Couvertier - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4614-3143-5

This has more of a hardware interfacing slant than most books on embedded systems which is what a software person needs. Every topic is first introduced in a general way with lots of illustrations and then its application in MSP430 is shown. Hence we can easily transfer our understanding to any other MCU family. A really good textbook for serious students of embedded electronics.

Yeah, I went through almost the same process :)

For transistors vs MOSFET I really liked https://youtu.be/DKYguNg1vmk as an overview

I like Elicia White’s Making Embedded Systems because it covers a lot of practical stuff like how to read a datasheet. It’s a good book for existing programmers.

A lot of electronic books struggle to find balance between super easy projects, very specific cookbook recipes or a laundry list of components.

I respectfully disagree.

I'm not sure who exactly this book is for, but it's certainly not for absolute beginners. There is a huge delta between the target audience and the level of understanding and experience someone not knowing a first thing about electronics would typically have.

I can clearly remember sitting there reading about component parasitics, without even having a clear idea how an ideal component behaves, and so on. I was just lacking buckets of context, and it was a painful read with lots of assumptions about the reader's background.

On the other hand, I still think it is a great book, like pretty much everything else from NoStarch. I just disagree on it being suitable as a first book in electronics.

That said, I'm looking forward to the day when I will be on an adequate enough level to read it again -- this time, in its entirety.

Super looking forward to it. Got it on preorder in Europe! Will still be a bit of a waiting time.

Always enjoy reading the blog posts, and this seems like a great way to support work that gives me joy. Who knows, might start picking up actual electronics as side projects. Hardware work seems like such a great way to get code into the physical world.

Maybe it should look like someone in a Western movie blowing smoke from a pistol?

Huff flux (like we all do), duh.

Like the best art, it's left up to the viewer to decide!

That alone makes me think it was drawn by AI. They say it's not...but that iconic pic sits directly in the uncanny valley.

Sshh. Her lips are sealed.

It's just a stylistic thing, same with the smoke, which represents heat more so than fumes.

Normally you hold the iron horizontal under the nose and of course don't breathe during the heat test.

And you don't actually kiss the soldering iron until it's cooled all the way down, and usually not unless the experimental circuit you came up with works the first time you plug it in :) So you can relax as intended and unplug the damn iron, without having to keep on hammering til all hours.

One thing she's not telling is the way you should be effective enough soldering using (very inexpensive) uncontrolled soldering irons, that you can eventually solder two pieces of solder together. Before you graduate to a "pro-grade" soldering station.

It is clearly a reference to a smoking gun. I think the cover is beautiful.

Just ordered. Love these kinds of books. Any others like this one people are aware of?

Pre-ordered mine(hardback). Yeesh....I have no impulse control because this looks like so much fun,

I just read a Quanta article from 2015 and literally had to check the date after the third "X not Y" I encountered. But the models have learned that from somewhere, too.

I'd counter that AI usually writes way better than typical person, definitely way better than any commenters here (myself included).

What's jarring about AI content is seeing the mastery of English applied in mundane contexts, where people are used to see more basic, pedestrian language.

(That, and overuse of patterns, which is more of an artifact of how people use LLMs - specifically that 90%+ of the AI output you see is the first response to the prompt in a fresh session. For AI, each time is the first time it's using this pattern, for user it's the 10th time they saw it within the span of an hour.)

Michał Zalewski (the author of this book) is goated. His book Silence on the Wire was very inspiring to me and the techniques he described often come to my mind years after reading the book

This thing is a tome. And I like it like that. Functions as a nerdy coffee table book when not in use.

PE4I (“Practical Electronics for Inventors”) has a whole chapter dedicated to sensors

Make: has a 3-vol series Encyclopedia of Electronic Components one of which is on Sensors - https://www.makershed.com/collections/books-on-electronics/p...

Also see Sensors and Signal Conditioning by Ramon Pallas-Areny and John Webster for a theoretical combination treatment.

Biggest distributor on Earth, can't make a link.

Got mine. And I'm a former EE. Looking forward to it, maybe inspire my daughter a bit.

This looks like it’ll be a good book for me to learn more about electrical theory and circuit design, I know a bit about AC and DC electricity from working in electrical construction which should help me dive right in, thanks for sharing this book release!

Ha, Ha, True.

That was a silly statement by the author; just say that this is "less theoretical" and not a textbook.

Looked at the contents/sample chapter and it seems just like many of the books published by make magazine.

My objective has often been to build & test as many experimental circuits as I could in the shortest amount of time.

One of the real good shortcuts is to just start soldering parts together according to a plan in your head, without taking the time to make a schematic drawing beforehand or do any advanced calculations.

There might be more emphasis on the properties and ratings of each component this way, this is not something to skip over, you should be very familiar with each component you use. Well in advance, and loads of hours of component study needs to be behind you, otherwise you may not do too good at just whipping something up on the bench that's electrically sound to begin with.

As pointed out, with math it can be the same way.

If you just want to quickly start picking up parts and soldering them together right away without doing any advanced calculations, the best shortcut is to have already become quite familiar with the equations including calculus when necessary, so you can bring to bear endless hours of mathematical study and use it to intuitively guide your soldering iron for every hour at the bench.

Edit: upvoted because your message should not be less than neutral, not greyed out at all. Obviously, I'm on the fence, sometimes I use math, other times not at all ;)

They have. When you need more math -- and you will if you stick with this business for very long -- it'll usually be obvious, and you can pick up those skills then. It's never been easier.

Thanks. And the publisher's companion page with supplementary materials is https://shop.elsevier.com/books/book-companion/9781558607354 .

As someone who’s had to refresh electronics a few times over the decades, I remember this course as being particularly good, for a couple of reasons.

The whole thing is organized around building explicit abstractions. You’re always making models, and choosing what to pay attention to and what to ignore. By making the real circuit match the model closely enough, you get to ignore the circuit and use it as building block for bigger things. This same approach is used from resistors to amplifiers to logic gates to CPUs.

Of course this how engineering actually works, but I haven’t seen an intro course presented this way so rigorously. If you’re a software person who deals with black box abstractions all day, it feels like home.

The course introduces concepts in order of simplicity, meaning you get MOSFETs and digital gates before you get BJTs. Many courses are arranged chronologically, so after you do Ohm’s law and capacitors you get dumped into BJTs, which are one of the most complicated things in the discrete toolkit, and hardly ever found in common use nowadays (except as cheap switches). Instead, you’re happily making amplifiers, switches, and logic with FETs, a much gentler introduction.

I also remember somewhere in the course lectures the professor says (paraphrased) “You may be thinking, why do I need to learn how a logic family works? Won’t I just be using some existing chip? This is MIT — you’re supposed to be the one making the chip.”

Love the "certified clank-free" logo

Already purchased, looking forward to getting it!!!

Oddly enough, one of my upper level math textbooks (maybe real analysis, don't remember) said the same thing about the definition of a set, except that "later" meant graduate school.

lcamtuf is one of the smartest people I've ever seen. When you read his work you realize he's only sort of putting about 1% of his intelligence on the page.

I am from software engineer background and how I learn Circuit is just watching the best 3 video from "Captive Aire" channel:

1. https://youtu.be/pDELW2pIvWw?si=BNsURdXrGLlaAfF3 (Digital Electronic)

2. https://youtu.be/RG3eljmqyq4?si=Pnbvf6P6HbFcIa1v (Alternating Current, Motors, & control)

3. https://youtu.be/nYuVSG89vg0?si=Oe3ZdJojS7T_iGxK (Electric Basic Made is Easy), and

the episode of "Nand to Tetris"

This book looks like it’s targeted squarely at people like me!

I’ve been a software engineer for the last couple of decades and I’ve tinkered with microcontrollers as a hobby but always been limited by my lack of electronics knowledge - very much trial and error to get a project far enough to be able to focus on the firmware (which is more my domain). I want to bridge the knowledge gap there.

My only formal electronics education was first year introduction to analog and digital circuits module at university two decades ago, led by a lecturer who assumed students had a huge corpus of pre-existing knowledge (and who I now suspect would have preferred to be supervising his PhD students and conducting research but had to make up the teaching hours - which I do understand).

I will definitely pick up a copy. However, Amazon UK (to avoid the NoStarch UPS shipping cost of $24) won’t get it to me until November. I’m excited to receive it.

looks like a great book, but the cover is hard to look at after having a few painful soldering burns

"She's a child!" shouted Albert.

"IT'S AN EDUCATIONAL TOY."

"What if she cuts herself?"

"THAT WILL BE A PAINFUL LESSON."

Looks like a brilliant book. If you ever write another I think a "hands-on experiments" would be a great follow up