Components Books

There is some dated materials in the Electronics Pocket Handbook, but the majority of the information is quite relevant and informative.
There are pleanty of tables for quick calculations and several short explainations of some concepts in electronics.

However, those with weak eyesight should use a mangifying glass with this book. It wouldn't be a "Pocket Handbook" if it was in Large Print.

This book is very small and the text is very tiny. Don't really simplify solution to get a better understanding.

The book is very clear on the concepts. Give the basis needed in a very brief way. I do like the style for beign very precise and concrete, giving the reader an opportunity to learn in a fast and easy way!

This little book is packed with plenty of great information, tables, charts, formulas, defenitions, math, plenty of circuits, analysis methods and more. Plenty of advanced topics, its not cryptic to newbies and if you are an experienced engineer it wont bore you either. I think this book is worth every penny and then some.

I certainly got more information about programming the 8051 microcontroller from this book than from Predko's 'Programming and Customizing the 8051', or for that matter, any other 8051 book I've managed to get my hands on (Steve Sokolowsky's "Assembly Language Basics" and Boyet and Katz's 'The 8051 Programming, Interfacing, Applications. Ok, that's only 2 more, but hey- it's the best out of 4). I couldn't figure ANYTHING out from them. Most of it is handled in a nice, logical manner. I wish SOMEONE whould just make a SHORT, CLEAR, CONCISE, BARE-BONES book of just what is important. If they did it write, you'd have EVERYTHING that was important and it wouldn't even be 30 pages long. These people all spend SO many words descriping a few simple concepts that are OBVIOUS, and then when I try to find what's important, I get an impenetrable bog of words. Even when I find it, then, it's explained in a manner much more complicated than the underlying concept, and if I finally get it, I just say to myself "ALL he had to say was THIS, and he only had to say it ONCE!". If I had could FIGURE OUT everything I wanted to know from the effusive sea of words comprising any of these sources I'd tried, I might even write a book myself, but you can't write about what you don't know, and if I could find a good book OUT THERE, the world wouldn't NEED another one! Well, maybe I could get all the info I needed from a good one and make a great one. But still. You'd think someone would do a better job than this.

The book may be considered as a basic tool for designing an embedded system. It spreads in almost all the areas of nowadays microcontrolled devices. The book is based on Intel's 8051, but the algorithms described may be implemented basically for any microcontroller. The book is not suitable for people who doesn't have basic knowledge in programming in Assembler and C, but it may be used by people who are making their first steps in embedded design. At the end of the book there is a full list of all the Assembler commands for 8051. My recomendation is to put an example after each command. It will be very helpful.
As a whole, the book is great expecially with all the diagrams in it and my opinion is that every engineer involved in embedded system design should have it on its bookshelf.

Well, to start of with - it was ONLY written by Karakehayov, the others are just there for show. Which means that the English language in the books is a bit bad. And the author (or publicher) didn't take the time to structure the book very well. BUT if you can live with that the books got GREAT diagrams, which if you can understand them, makes the book invaluble for designing a complicated embedded system or software.

The book also takes emphasis on assambler, only one of the chapters is a review of c programming.

This book covers some of the gray area between basic research in embedded systems, and microcontroller applications gravitating strongly to a particular device. Perhaps the title should emphasize accurately the fact that the covers the Intel 8051 and Philips 83C552.

The material is presented comprehensively in great technical depth. Clarity is enhanced by a wealth of well organized diagrams supporting the text appropriately. The book offers plenty of "goodies" like the proposed classification and graphical symbols for all microcontroller flags - something that I have not seen in any other book.

The book targets the embedded computer professionals and advanced hobbyists. In the academic environment it would perfectly serve as a guiding text for undergraduate or graduate courses. I would also strongly recommend the book for instrumentation projects where the students have to design and build their own systems.

I am very disappointed about this book. It absolutely has a wrong title. The author may have different definition of "Intuitive Design". Detailed excamples in this book are helpful for beginner. But after go through all of the equations and derivations, you can not get any ideal about intuitive design!

I've been an analog designer for years. This book is not intuitive, because it walks the reader through formulas a circuit designer would hardly ever use, except when in school. Transistor circuits can be designed quickly using a few rules of thumb. But this book doesn't include any of these. You can get op amp handbooks from the vendor, like National Semiconductor; or circuits from a mixed signal vendor like Maxxim, and modify these circuits to fit your requirements. The same applies for power supplies. If you need to learn how to design analog circuits, there are many "cook books" out there to get the job done fast.
Usually, if a designer is given a spec for a circuit, he doesn't have time to spend weeks reading this book. He uses a few nomographs, and gets a bread board design fast. This book uses many SPICE circuits, which are hard to read. Many times the author references elements which are not labeled on the schematic. True, a analog designer needs to to be eclectic,
but he also needs to get the job done ASAP. I should add that many analog designers work with DSP technology too. This has been omitted. There are analog simulation CAD packages out there, from Analog Devices, as well as TINA. SPICE is a pain to use.

The book is full of examples and real-world stuff on analog circuit design. Would be a good addition to any designer's library.

This is a design handbook for electronic engineering students and practicing engineers interested in learning practical techniques for designing and analyzing analog circuits using the basic building blocks of transistors, diodes, and op-amps. Readers will notice that the author makes some assumptions about the reader - that he or she has been exposed to undergrad courses in electronic devices, signals and systems, and signal processing. This is not a book for hobbyists.

Chapters one and two are introductory in nature. Chapter 1 provides the motivation for analog circuit design in general. Chapter 2 covers some important signal processing concepts that are the basis of material in later chapters. Chapters three through eight cover the bipolar device physics, the BJT, transistor amplifiers, and approximation techniques for bandwidth estimation and switching speed analysis. Chapter nine covers the basics of CMOS and CMOS amplifiers. The bandwidth estimation techniques developed in earlier chapters for amplifer design work well for CMOS devices as well.

Chapter 10 covers transistor switching, as in how you get a transistor to turn on and off quickly, and how you estimate that speed. Chapter 11 reviews feedback systems and Bode plot methods of designing stable feedback systems. The next two chapters discuss the design, use, and limitations of op-amps including voltage-feedback and current-feedback op-amps. Chapter 14 covers the basics of analog low-pass filter design, including ladder and active implementations of Butterworth, Chebyshev, elliptic, and Bessel filters. Chapter 15 switches topics and goes to PC board layout rules and the use and limitations of passive components. Chapter 16 is a mixed bag of useful design techniques and tricks that don't fit into the other chapters. The book contains illustrative analysis problems and MATLAB and PSPICE design examples throughout as well as chapter problem sets.

This book is a nice companion to The Art of Electronics and other such books that act as capstone courses, since it draws on a wide body of electronics knowledge - not just one course. Highly recommended for the practical kind of information and problems you often don't see in textbooks but that you'll require in industry.

The workbook is the perfect companion to the intermediate Japanese text. It reinforces the lesson and provides extra practice.

For those who expect to learn Japanese in less than a year, be fluent, and a master of the language... this book is not for you. It goes at Japanese (though this is the manual for Part Two) with a student-approach. It has everyday life scenarios, has written and reading Japanese activities, introduces Kanji practice exercises in the workbook, has available listening comprehension, and cultural notes.

This Japanese learning series is based on a student-learning level. It is not for someone looking to study Business Japanese, or someone with an extreme cultural focus. This book focuses (and the other in the series) on teaching basic, practical Japanese. In the second book, it goes into more detail and harder forms of verbs, tenses, and so forth. Both plain and polite language is discussed, and it gives vocabulary words at easy-to-grasp levels.

There is a glossary in the back, and a thorough index.

I studied Book One on a High School school level (a level which, curriculum wise, is only allowed to move slow) for four years. Later, I continued with Japanese, and went through the second book.

This is not the type of book that will teach contemporary Japanese in an instant. It is not the type of book that NEEDS to make the learner love Japanese more or less. A stutent of Japanese (or any language) should go into the field with a desire to learn. Japanese is very different from much of the English language. It is a hard language, but, the book is correct on one matter. Japanese is elegant, beautiful, and a language that everyone should be proud to study. It takes perserverence and a great attention to practice and detail. It also takes a good instructor. The book cannot do all the work FOR you.

Therefore, with careful study, practice, diligence, a good textbook, and a teacher who is up to date in Japanese, a student can learn and become fluent. You can't blame a textbook for what your class was lacking.

But, Youkoso (both Volume 1 and 2, and the accompanying workbooks) will be beneficial to a student of Japanese and are good tools for learning and mastering a different language.

I used the first Yookoso in a Japanese class I took before I came to Japan. Because I liked the format and grammar explanations, I bought this book. It's been a big help in my struggle to learn Japanese. Many texts throw a lot of unrelated vocabulary at you expecting you to memorize every word. Yokooso groups the vocabulary by theme (e.g. work related words, health words, etc). Thus you're learning in a sensible manner.

I own Yookoso I and II, both versions of each. This book is the worst thing you can use to teach Japanese to native English speakers. The author has the bizarre notion that Japanese is a simple and elegant language compared to English, and all that is needed is to present it to English speakers in this light, and they'll spontaneously start speaking and reading as fluently as a Japanese who took 12 years in school to learn his kanji.

I started out believing that it was of primary importance to learn the script simultaneously with the other aspects of the language. Unfortunately, it took two years of slow, stumbling sounding out of syllables to be able to read at any reasonable speed. (Wa...ta...shi...wa...su...shi...o...ta...be...ma...su...) Even though I spent far more time than is reasonable (or was expected) studying the material, I never felt as though I mastered any of it. By the time I had taken 4 semesters, everybody else had become discouraged and quit Japanese entirely. Worst of all, I had no listening comprehension and could not produce anything remotely resembling speech. The exercises in the books are full of unexplained irregularities, so when you do them, you get them wrong and can't figure out why. (They fixed that in the second edition by taking the answers out of the back of the book, so we couldn't check our work.) The workbook, on the other hand, seems to be written by someone who is unconcerned that they material they are using hasn't been presented to the student.

A book must be judged on its result, and this book didn't result in any of over 100 students learning to speak Japanese, or continuing its study. As a linguistics grad student, I am now convinced that to learn a spoken language, you must be exposed to speech, and how much you learn is directly related to that exposure. The more you attempt to intellectualize the task, the more you distract from the natural acquisition of language.

If you think the way to learning a language is paved with endless multidimensional tables of grammatical rules, long lists of vocabulary without context, and myriad bookwork exercises, this is the book for you.

If you want to learn Japanese, get RosettaStone.

I found this is a truly useful book for practical IC designers like myself.

I found this book a nice complement to existing literature such as "Basic ESD and I/O Design." The complementary characterisitc of this book arises from addressing the issue of designing ESD structures from the standpoint of an IC designer, with plenty of actual circuit examples (although mostly digital).

The only criticism is that the book is poorly written, too colloquial, with many grammatical misconstructions.

This is a bad book with many mistakes (not just spelling mistakes but design and interpretation mistakes!!). The author do not have seems to have hands-on experience in ESD and not known in ESD area, which is clear from his approach. Do not waste the money..
If you are a designer, go and buy the book by Maloney and Dabral.
If you are a device engineer, buy the book by Duvvury and Amerasekera.

Having owned this book for several weeks, now I could make some comments here. Well, if you need some books on ESD or IO design, you won't be able to find many. This book is one of several good books with comprehensive coverage on ESD protection. It addresses ESD test models, protection circuit design techniques, failure analysis, layout and simulations.

However, my personal feeling is that this book came from lots of author's paper collections instead of his own experience. Especially, in Chapter 6 (ESD Failure Analysis and Modeling), virtually all examples were borrowed from others, and the reproduced FA images are poor. Also, I agree ... that the book was not well written. It has too many long sentences which make you read uneasily.

Looking for a better one? Wiley just published the second edition of "ESD in Silicon Integrated Circuits" which is far better than first edition, and it's more practical and much cheaper than this book, with super quality. Maybe I can give a brief comparison between these two books here, academic vs. industry, professors vs. engineers.

This book is generally good although I have not read all of the book yet.
It approaches at the system level of the PLL, not at the circuit level, so reader may need another book if they have to design the PLL.

I think this book give designers a good understanding of the fundamental theorie of PLLs. It gives you step by step the necessarly mathematical background to understand how a PLL is working. The examples are mostly for analog PLLs, but the mathematical theories are the same for all kind of implementations.

I really like the chapter where the different PLL-Parameters are defined: It clearly explains and defines the different working modes like "hold", "lock" or "pull-in".

The book is not for people who are looking for prepared applications. Even when the subtitle of the book suggests this.

The book is most helpful, but a little out of date with regards to moderm PLL techniques, especialy charge pump o/p types and makes no referance to lead lag passive filter loops. This hinders the usefulness of the enclosed program which would benefit from a 'modernisation'

This book is certainly worth owning. It is 1 of 7 PLL books that I own. I use it as a reference for the basic PLL linearized transfer functions even after I found that the transfer function for the 2nd order PLL with ideal integrator is incorrect.

Best covers analog PLLs with each block replaced by a digital implementation based on the incremental improvements made in standard TTL PLLs offered over the decades. This allows the reader to fully understand each digital block and the PLL in a way that is excellent for an introductory text.

The digital PLL is a numerical implementation of each PLL function, which has by definition an analog function. One way to implement such a numerical PLL is via replacing each analog function with the equivalent numerical function, without much focus on the Z domain and digital signal processing (DSP) concepts. That is what this book does. Look elsewhere for a book with heavy use of Z domain math (consider the Kluwer Acedemic Press Book 'Phase-Locked Loops for Wireless Communications: Analog and Digital' by Stephen (?) for more DSP math.

Best's approach is viable. I have personally designed a leading edge all-digital PLL, adding patent pending analog enhancements, and can asure the reader that straight-forward DSP approaches do not lead to the optimal designs, at least at the high data rates. Understanding of the PLL in analog form, and then adding the digital analogues is an excellent way to go. Best's book is surprisingly very different from Wolaver's book, almost orthogonal; start with Wolaver, then add Best if the slow peicemeal digital evolution is of interest to you.

This book is an excellent reference for understanding the Photodiode circuits. It is gives good coverage of the limitations of the transimpedance amplfier, gives good comparision of different schemes for I to V convertors and covers noise in photodiode circuits extensively. It is a good text for low frequency application . Not meant for real high speed design reference.

This book lives up to its title by giving a thorough review of photodiodes driving op-amps. It does not consider specialized, discrete photodiode amplifiers. By limiting the coverage to op-amps, the bandwidths are necessarily those of op-amps, a few tens of megahertz at the time most of the book was written, perhaps 100 MHz or so today. Truly wide bandwidth solutions (GHz) are left to the imagination of the reader.

Excellent book for design of optical measurement etc type of application and undrestand noise and errors in the circuit.

Basic stuff. This book collects dust on my lab shelf. Transimpedance amplifiers - you can find this stuff on the web for free. Absolutely no talk of charge integration.

Most of the signal integrity/high speed circuit books focus on explaining relationship between two conductors, for example, the EM field between a trace and a plane. However, as a practicing engineer, it is impossible and unnecessary to calculate or simulate each trace when designing PCB. This is when this book comes handy. It provides quick design guidelines and rule of thumb without having to worry too much about the underlying theory. Many other reviewers see it as a drawback, but I think this book is pretty practical when used with more theoretical book such as Signal Integrity Simplified.

However, I found some parts of this book are quite difficult to follow as the author might assume that the readers are experience engineers who know all the jargons and theories. For instance, I am confused with chassis ground and system ground. Sometimes the author say should connect chassis to ground, sometimes he said it mustn't. The term "dipole antenna" appears quite often in the book, but it is not clearly explained what it is.

In conclusion, the books give decent PCB layout guidelines to prevent EMC problem. However, it doesn't provide readers the knowledge to do precise analysis and simulation to tackle signal integrity/EMC problems that might arise. I would recommend to get "Signal Integrity Simplified" as a companion book.

I got this book because the boss said to find something to help resolve the FCC/CE and other world EMI/EMC compliance issues we have, and it was instantly used and had the answers we needed.

It covers power and grounds, signal integrity, and used with Howard Johnson's book (High Speed Digital Design), gives a strong insight to the PC board layout issues of high speed digital and analog electronics.

So far it has been useful in my designs. They seem to be better and I am sure the book has helped with certification. It has some very useful information. Unfortunatly, it does not have much supporting information or theoretical proofs. Perhaps this helps the non-math oriented user, but I can't imagine why a non-math oriented user would need such a book or what such a person would be doing designing for EMC. As an engineer, I don't take things on face value without understanding of why. The lack of general theory also makes it difficult to extend the information provided to areas not covered in the book. In short, I'd like to know a bit more about why.

This book looks perfect on paper. The subject matter is important, it talks about many practical concepts, the cover is cute, etc. But trying to read this book I was very disappointed. The author has just cut and pasted some well-known ideas but doesn't explain anything clearly. Despite knowing the subject I found it painful to follow. I wanted to throw the book away after reading a few sections, but I kept telling myself "it can't be that bad, the material is fine, let me give it another chance". But the book is that bad! It is no excuse that this is a "handbook". There are many books that are not textbooks that do a great job explaining things. I feel sorry for anybody who is trying to learn by reading this book. If you are a beginner read Howard Johnson's classic "Black Magic" book. If you are more advanced read Clayton Paul or books on Microwave design.

I donated my book to the city library, but I was very tempted to throw it away to save somebody else from struggling with it.

The seller honestly ranks the book as "Good".
Actually, it likes a brand new book.
Thank you

This book is another excellent work from Sze. All the technologically important points have been well covered by Sze. Finally a must have for technologists working and students interested in the field of ULSI.

The problem with the book is that it is not a book at all: it is a collection of 12 articles which vary enormously in their style and level. Some are excellent, like Richard Fair's RTP chapter, but many are run-of-the-mill reviews. A welcomed addition is that wafer cleaning and clean room technology have chapters of their own, usually they tend to be regarded as side issues. Editors have not syncronized the chapters: planarization is discussed twice: in both CVD and process integration chapters and silicides three times: in RTP, metallization and process integration.

The book is not specifically about ULSI: it is a general overview of silicon (mostly MOS) process technologies, or at least I do not consider molecular beam epitaxy, contact lithography or bias sputtered quartz as ULSI technologies. Maybe this is for textbook completeness, but then why is oxidation absent ?

The intended audience of this book remains a mystery to me: in the preface it is described as a textbook (for senior undergraduates or first year graduate students) but the structure of the book does not support a fabrication course because many essential items have been left out: e.g. oxidation and ion implantation.

Most chapters contain 50-100 references to literature, but to old literature: process integration chapter ("totally revised and updated") average date of references is 1987, with only a handful of 1990's articles.

This book is merely a collection of articles written by various authorities in the field. Sze probably put the end of chapter problems in it (most of which are challenging) which do not closely reflect the chapter's theme. In that sense, this is a BAD book - the correlation is awful. As far as just reading the chapters, some of the chapters are well written and this book merits 3 stars. I think it is safe to say there are better books (real textbooks by one or two authors) out there pertaining to the field of VLSI Fabrication.

This is one of the dumbest mountain biking books I ever read. The section on how-to-bunnyhop is hilarious. This is a skill much sought-after skill by many avid mtn cyclists, akin to learning bumps in skiing and what does this book offer? Absolutely nothing. There is a picture of a guy bunnyhopping and the author just goes on to say that clipless pedals help, but does not explain how some bmx-ers and flat pedal users can jump as high as 4 feet. Huh? Did I missed something? Retarded book. Skip!

This is a very good book, it tells different places that you can go biking and the techniques that you should use to go over different hazards, this has to be one of the best, most informative MBing book I have ever read.

This is a very informative book. It was written with the beginner/intermediate mountain biker in mind. The book take you from the simple steps of mounting your bike, to basic maintenence and care. From tricks and trails, to races and upgrades, it is an excellent beginner mountain bike handbook!

The photos used in this book are nice, but I found them to be lacking in detail, especially when maintenance procedures are described. Additionally, the text is vague and too simplified at times. A beginners' book should not necessarily translate into less detail. Overall, the book covers a broad range of topics and is good for absolute beginners.