What is your favorite electronics or software book?

Doug,

I find that I am buying fewer and fewer books these days.  Prior to the explosion of internet tutorials and examples, a good book was the best way for me to learn new skills.  Some of my favorite books (that I still reference) are:

The Art of Electronics by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill

Beginning Visual C++ 2008 by Ivor Horton

USB Complete by Jan Axelson

I was a follower of CIrcuit Cellar Magazine for many years. (I have several years worth of these on bye shelves)

I continue to use books. I revisit them frequently for inspiration.

These are the ones I use the most from my bookshelf:

• The Art of Electronics,Paul Horowitz, Winfield Hill
• Digital Design: Principles and Practices, John Wakerly
• Embedded Systems: Real-Time Interfacing to Arm Cortex-M Microcontrollers,  Jonathan W Valvano
• Embedded Systems: Introduction to Arm Cortex-M Microcontrollers,  Jonathan W Valvano
• Embedded Systems: Real-Time Operating Systems for Arm Cortex M Microcontrollers, Jonathan W Valvano

• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
• Introduction to Algorithms, Thomas H. Cormen
• Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture: Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects
• Pattern–Oriented Software Architecture: Patterns for Resource Management
• Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture: A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing
• Pattern–Oriented Software Architecture: A System of Patterns
• The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction, Hastie, Trevor, Tibshirani, Robert, Friedman, Jerome, Brand
• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, Robert C. Martin
• The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers
• Effective Java: A Programming Language Guide, Joshua Bloch
• Java Concurrency in Practice, Goetz Brian..

David Tansley Linux & Unix Shell Programming First Published 2000.

A dog-eared compendium of command line tools that I still use to this day. The book not only provides the commands but extensive examples of how they can be applied. The book has given me so much such success, I would rather use it first before doing a Google search.

I sed, awk and regex'd my way through normalising and correcting a twenty seven year old telephone database system with 650K records that had few constraints or data validation parameters. The system was do to be ungraded. On a first pass of transferring data between the old and new system 65K records error'd out. That number had to be reduced to less than 1/2 of 1% before cut-over.

I constructed many small oracle databases on a Linux platform in my home basement and imported tables of text file data from the system. Between SQL and shell commands and the advice of an experienced telephone person that knew the data, the data-set was slow amended. Small uploads of record correction were applied to the original system, using the systems native tools. This was long before the pretty GUI tools that exists today. Two weeks of basement dwelling and command line crawling resulted in less than 200 record errors at cutover. The total project took six months.

Why I never recall that experience as a response to question "Please provide an example of how needed to use your own initiative to come up with a solution to a problem? " is beyond me. Thanks for the question DW. You gave me reason to smile.

High Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic by Howard Johnson

Electromagnetic Compatibility Engineering by Henry W. Ott

For sentimental reasons, a paper copy of the Digikey website.

- W.

Oh awk, how well I remember thee.  I was working for a company that developed financial software for grocery stores.  We were doing a conversion on data from the prior system to ours and the responsibility of the data migration fell on me.  I wrote a huge awk script to do the conversion.  I was able to convert all of the active records (over 500K) including recovery of all of the pin codes (that were stored encrypted).  I was actually able to script out the decryption and encryption routines in awk! (after retrieving the master keys from the prior encryption system).  Through the years, whenever I need to script a solution I go back to awk (now using ported versions to windows).

I seldom ready electronics or software books these days.

I find my reading falls into more on line or ebooks.

Curiously, my book sales have been about evenly distributed between hardcopy and PDF.

DAB

AWKmazing:) Not much data is in raw text anymore so manipulating data in that form is few and far between. I still use it to parse and edit human readable files. I usually have to break out the book to do it now. Command syntax not on my finger tips as in times gone past.

While not a book, per se, I'm still going to drop back to my old (and sadly defunct) favorite: 3-2-1 Contact Magazine. I got my start copying BASIC programs from the back pages in the early 90s and grew from there!

Art of Electronics, but that goes without saying. (Even though I said it.)

For physical magazines, I take the physical copies from IEEE committees that still offer them. I read every issue of IEEE Spectrum. In the past, I also read Bodo's Power each issue.

Outside of those, I'm following this thread to see others I can add to my list.

The book that I open the most is The Art of Electronics.  I also have a book on C++ and another on Python but I find myself doing internet searches now rather than using those books for the most part when I have a question.  And the way I keep up with things is the internet instead of magazines like the old days.  I was a late convert though. Getting a really big monitor and finding reliable sources of good information finally won me over.