I see some discussion of which books are good for people with various levels of electronics knowledge. I'd like to add one that I've never seen mentioned here: Agarwal and Lang's "Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronics".
This was the book used by MIT in 2007 for the first course in the EE and CS programs. It is that year's course that is on their Open Courseware platform [1], and the readings list there links to a full PDF of the book.
(Edit: click the book title on the readings page, not the "View e-book version" link. See my response to groos' comment below for details).
This is not a link to a pirated copy BTW. Agarwal is a pioneer in the open-education movement and the authors intentionally arranged for an open access PDF.
The lecture videos on Open Courseware are very good too.
[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-002-circuits-and-electronics-s...
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.”
The PDF no longer appears to be there or at least is well hidden.
Oh, I see the problem. You clicked the "View e-book version" link. That goes to the publisher's store. As far as I know they never had a PDF, just a special web version.
Click the book's title in the paragraph above that, where it says this:
> Agarwal, Anant, and Jeffrey H. Lang. Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Elsevier, July 2005. ISBN: 9781558607354.
That takes you to a PDF.
Sorry for not being more specific. I didn't even notice the "View e-book version" as I only went to the site to remind myself of the name of the book, saw the title was a link, and clicked it. Then I thought "Why is MIT linking to a pirate copy of a book from one of their own professors?", and did a little Googling to get some backstory.
Also, "Readings" is hidden behind a "Menu" menu button on the mobile-device version of that page.
Geesh...it also behind a "Menu" button on desktop if the page is not wide enough.
Here is the PDF they link to: https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_120/Agarwal%20...
Thanks. And the publisher's companion page with supplementary materials is https://shop.elsevier.com/books/book-companion/9781558607354 .