Great Guide For The Electronically Perplexed

books:


	• Bebop to the Boolean Boogie: An Unconventional Guide to Electronics (with CD-ROM), Second Edition Clive Maxfield Newnes, 2002 - 500 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Irreverent writing, good topics

Maxfield's book is unique, both in format and in content. And I'm not just talking about the gumbo recipe at the end.

The first section, almost 150 pages, is "logic lite." It starts with transistors, both MOS and bipolar. From there it works its way up to simple latches and such, and scratches the surface of state machines, with side trips to boolean arithmetic and such. The breezy, informal style will work for people put off by more academic treatments, but the logic design content stops way short of what any other basic logic text would present.

The second, longer section covers material sorely missing from all other logic texts I know. It starts with the simpler parts of silicon fab process, then goes through all kinds of printed circuits and hybrid packages giving a fair tour of the basic printed curcuit (PC) processes that were current when the book was written (1995). It even goes into gutsy stuff like the copper patterns in PC processes that have to do with heat flow during soldering. All those real-world facts earned this book an extra star. The "far out technology" chapter at the end is an interesting read, too, with its discussions of nano, optical, and molecular computing.

The book's weaknesses are significant, though. It would work well with any of several companion texts that would cover what this misses. That includes more advanced logic techniques, like alternatives to gate-level implementation and all the fussy bits of state machines. A standard logic text (e.g. Katz) would fill in those blanks. Going in a different direction, it does only a little towards talking about how PC layout interacts with logic design. More about ground planes, guard rings, power decoupling, RF emissions, etc. would fit well with the detail presented here, espcially when you see how much time and effort it already spends on "vias" vs. "holes." The little bit of analog discussion from the front would help here - why inductive effects matter at high frequencies, why distributed capacitance is different from lumped, why you'd have a high-value and low-value capacitor in parallel, and why that ceramic cap near the power input has a saw cut in the edge. A third possible direction would be the way Wirth's book on circuit design for CS students went: into the higher levels of design, letting tools attend to the lower levels. The biggest flaw is in treating FPGAs as exotic, out-there technology - by 1995, they were well into the main stream, and have very nearly killed off discrete logic and ASICs in many areas.

If you just want a light-weight intro to logic design and to the physical circuits that carry it, this is OK. It could have been better in all directions and, at this 2005 writing, you should check it's sell-by date. I gave it the fourth star for addressing PCs and mounting at all, not for addressing them well.

//wiredweird

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Great Guide For The Electronically Perplexed

I grew up watching my neighbor, a mechanic, work on cars and it helped me pick up the basics. When I would try to take apart a transistor radio and figure out how it worked I was left with an assortment of colorful bits and no clues. This book is the remedy for my total ignorance of things electronic. Just how good it is I do not know due to my lack of knowledge in the field. I reccomend it to any interested beginners.

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Great refresher!

I love that I can just skim through this book & find the information that I need. It is really basic - clearly written with great examples. After being away from work for 8 years & being out of school for almost 20, it was a great refresher! Besides, Max proves that even geeks can have a sense of humor!

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Makes Really Boring Stuff Interesting

As a student finishing my B.S. in Computer Science, I very badly needed something to liven up my CPU architecture and discrete math classes, which were horribly boring.

This book not only did a GREAT job of clarifying the finer points of boolean logic, but somehow managed make it interesting. I would recommend this book to anyone trying to understand the nuts-and-bolts behind what makes your computer tick.

Great book

Considering this book deals with what I consider to be rocket science at best and black magic at worst I think it does a really good job of explaining things. I'm still working through it and it still makes my head hurt but I recommend this for anyone like me who wants to understand this stuff and has zero background to do so.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

From reviews of the first edition:

"If you want to be reminded of the joy of electronics, take a look at Clive (Max) Maxfield's book Bebop to the Boolean Boogie." --Computer Design

"Lives up to its title as a useful and entertaining technical guide....well-suited for students, technical writers, technicians, and sales and marketing people." --Electronic Design

"Writing a book like this one takes audacity! ... Maxfield writes lucidly on a variety of complex topics without 'writing down' to his audience." --EDN

"A highly readable, well-illustrated guided tour through basic electronics." -Science Books & Films

"Extremely readable and easy to understand, you'll wonder how people learned about this stuff before this book came along." --New Book Bulletin, Computer Literacy Bookshops

* The difference between the analog and digital worlds.

* What logic gates are and how to make them from transistors.

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