Customer Reviews

The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design (EDN Series for Design Engineers)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jim Williams is a famous circuit designer, and has a bunch of friends who are famous circuit designers (or very good ones who are liable to become famous one of these days). This book, a sequel to his excellent "Analog Circuit Design: Art, Science, and Personalities" gives you a look inside the minds of these guys, and the result is very illuminating. It is an eclectic volume, ranging from Harrison's eighteenth-century maritime chronometer to oscilloscope vertical amplifiers to detailed advice on how to approach design problems. Williams's own chapter, "The Importance of Fixing" focuses on the intellectual discipline of troubleshooting, and what a wonderful classroom the inside of a broken but well-designed piece of hardware can be.

The emphasis of this volume is growing good engineers, by teaching the rhythm of the insight, design, prototype, debug iteration as practiced by the best. If you have circuits to design, this book will pay for itself in about 5 minutes, and you'll be a more confident and adventurous designer. I've owned it for five years or so, and read it at least annually.

This is a Lazy Saturday Afternoon book. You can read it front-to-back or you can just flip to random pages. Either way, you'll find very entertaining stories (as long as you're an EE) packed with great information. Covers everything from obscure transistor parameters to marketing. It made me a better engineer and I enjoyed every page.

You gotta admire the experienced geeks and how they learnt electronics stuff the hard but lasting way. They can never forget the basics as they have so much practical experience. Being a beginner in this wonderful field of analog design, I enjoyed the book a lot. We tend to cram ourselves with knowledge from different books and our instructors also encourage us to explore different methods of explaining things but nothing can beat the time tested, practical experience gained by doing stuff on the bench. Some of the design ideas are really good. After reading this book read the book "trouble shooting analog circuits" by Bob Pease. The authors have proven that practical bench experience is as important as theory in doing good, marketable designs.

As the second of Jim Williams' compilations, this book once again offers superb insight to aspiring analog circuit designers and working pros alike. There's nothing like high quality war stories from the top pros in the trenches to help give you a proper sense for how those pros operate. Most of this is quite inspiring. Inspiration is a priceless commodity that is rarely provided in decent doses in so-called 'professional education' nowadays. Instead, most EE textbooks would put even a dedicated enthusiast to sleep. Not so this book. This book is the real deal. It impresses me even more when the other contributors, other than Jim Williams, can also provide top notch stories. I especially liked the story about the 'Ticking Box' by Lloyd Brown. The stories really vary a lot, and salted throughout are valuable lessons of every sort learned by practicing engineers on the job; most of these valuable lessons you WILL NOT find in EE textbooks. Jim Williams may well be the greatest legend ever to walk the halls of an analog electronics lab, but when he reaches out to a healthy collection of the other top minds in the field and gets them to contribute works of this quality, and brings it all together in a volume like this, you just have to admit that a major donation has been made to the industry. The diversity of viewpoints presented, and the breadth and depth of each of those viewpoints will move your mind around and help you see problems from more useful angles. But the most important lesson perhaps, the meta lesson as it were, is that only inspired people make the major contributions in any field. Only inspired people have the love of the field and the long-term bloodhound seeking that eventually grants them major success. You have to feed yourself with inspiration. When you read a book like this, the enthusiast in you, the little kid with wide eyes of wonder can come out and enjoy the love of electronics again. What's better than that?

I've been an analog circuit designer for forty years. Jim's book provides great historical information and a lot of circuit design information. Definitely a "must read" for someone that wants to learn more about electronics and has a desire to be a knowledgeable design engineer. I really don't understand the smug response from the two-star reviewers. Buy it, you'll like it.

The title and reviews give the impression that this book is a collection of the black arts and secrets of analog design. It isn't. 80% of the chapters are old-timers' "when I were a lad" stories. It's not necessarily a bad book - it's highly entertaining and well-written, and new graduates will find the real-life hints and caveats useful, but if you have more than a few years of experience in the industry, don't expect to be educated.

The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design was an extremely interesting book to me. I have been a fan of Jim Williams for many years. Jim's ideas have showed me how to design wide bandwidth circuits and build them in my basement. I read the book from cover to cover.
Larry Dobbins

This book has a number of good sections, but the majority of the book is really stupid. It has a really good section for job interview preparation, and it gives a good idea of workplace politics. The technical knowledge from this book is not useful whatsoever. I did not find it to be funny, it was actually really embarrassing to be reading a book with random pictures such as an open pizza box, or the guy's wife with a rolling pin about to smash an oscilloscope.