/cyber/ - Cyberpunk & Science Fiction

For general purpose electronics knowledge it's a good reference book, but at 1000 pages it would take you a few years if you wanted to read it from cover to cover.

Since you mentioned digital, what kind of projects did you have in mind? If you want to use microcontrollers and interface with various devices via I2C, SPI, RS232 or any other interface, then you want to look more into C programming than electronics, as you usually only need to know basics in the first chapter of the book and maybe chapter 13, which talks about AD and DA converters. If you only want to use such devices it's better to read for example AVR application notes or tutorials, so you don't get overwhelmed by the complexity.

For digital in sense of 7400 series ICs, I would probably use some other book that focuses more on digital design. First few chapters of "Digital design: Principles and practices" would give you enough knowledge to build most things you can imagine with those ICs. This knowledge also enables you to start messing with FPGAs.

If you want to learn electronics just to realize projects, just start working on them and learn as you go. If things does not make sense in one book, look into the others (use http://libgen.io). Don't get stuck trying to fully understand how things work. Math and physics behind even simple components such as capacitors and inductors is complicated. You don't need to know about Maxwell's equations to use those them (unless you start doing high speed digital or RF work, then you can't escape them, even Kirchhoff's laws don't hold anymore at high frequencies).

To summarize: Read first chapter of AoE and proceed to work on your projects.

Like anon said it's a reference book. I've never understood why it's recommended for beginners.

Grob's Basic Electronics is the best book for… basic electronics, it's more suited for self study than most college books.

It depends on what level you're currently at really.

>>48472

I'm working on building a Z80 computer (I'm the OP from the homebrew computer/Z80 thread).

I'm already very comfortable with things like C programming and such, my discomfort is being able to satisfactorially answer questions like:

"Can my D[7:0] pins on my Z80 processor be wired to ROM, RAM, and my thermal printer data ports simultaneously without any issues, so long as only one of them is getting a clock/RD/WR signal at a time?"

I'm not 100% sure

I also had some questions on memory timing, and a friend told me there was a chapter in there mentioning it.

>>48481

>Can my D[7:0] pins on my Z80 processor be wired to ROM, RAM, and my thermal printer data ports simultaneously without any issues, so long as only one of them is getting a clock/RD/WR signal at a time?

That's mostly information you'll find in Z80's datasheet. It mentions that pins D[7:0] are tristate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-state_logic Once you read wikipedia description of what tristate is all about you'll find out that with usual low and high pin states there is additional high-impedance state, meaning there is a huge resistance on that pin, effectively making it disconnected from the circuit. As your Z80 will be acting as master commanding other devices, you need to research if your devices support tristate logic. Usually if the device has enable pin it will put pins in high impedance state on logic low (or high if it's inverted), read the datasheet of the device. If it doesn't support such feature you'll need to add external buffer that will do that for you (74HC125 for example).

>>48488

OP here, that's very helpful, thanks, I'll look into that.