Re: AoE 3rd Edition coming soon? A question for Winfield

Fred Bloggs wrote:



Winfield Hill wrote:

bill.sloman@xxxxxxxx wrote...

The book is a university text book - admittedly aimed at bright
students. Paul Horowitz originally developed it for his electronics for
physicists ourse at Harvard, and it was an undergraduate text in the
electronic engineering course at Cambridge University in the U.K. when
I was working in Cambridge (not at the university).



That's not wholly true. Our book was written as a reference book as
well as a textbook. To the extent we start at a basic level, we hoped
the book could be a self-learning and reference tool for a non-engineer
or hobbyist. We wanted to appeal to graduate students in fields other
than physics or engineering. It's true that Paul's motivation to work
on the book came in part from his need for a book for Physics 123, the
Harvard Physics dept electronics course. But my motivation came from
a desire to tell the world about my bag of design tricks and my favored
back-of-the-envelope approach to electronics engineering. As we say in
the preface, it's a book by a practicing engineer and a teacher. Even
though the early project-pitch to publishers was based on Paul's class
notes, there's not much in common between them and the finished book.
That early pitch to publishers, BTW, resulted in a stream of rejections.


Successful undergraduate textbooks sell very well - a psychologist that
I know got a $250,000 advance from his pulbisher for the third edition
of his first-year psychology textbook, which only stands at 52,000 in
the Amazon sales rankings.



It does do well in Amazon's rankings and has sold over 500,000 copies
worldwide, IIRC. But our publisher's analysis shows that less than
half of those were for classroom textbook use. Our book is clearly not
optimally designed as a textbook, it has far too much reference material
that's not relevant to teaching and confuses the student who's preparing
for taking exams. It's ideally oriented, in our minds, to a scientific
experimenter who needs to make something to improve their experiment.

It can be helpful to a classically-educated electronics engineer who
needs to pick up some practical circuit-design skills. You know, the
engineer who may be well trained in FPGAs, microprocessors and MatLab,
but who doesn't know much about soldering irons, JFETs, opamp current
sources, or power transformers with bridge rectifiers and filter caps.
It also goes into considerable detail in some areas not often taught
in EE school, but often needed in the real world, such as low-noise
amplifiers and low-power circuit-design tricks.



I never find an application circuit in that thing when I'm looking for one.

I have kept it near at hand, and not because I need to design circuits.

Had one of my rare calls about a design that wasn't simulating and meeting specs. Looked at his circuit, asked what he needed to do, and then grabbed AoE. In a few moments, was looking at instrumentation amp configurations, and at his design, and realized why he was not getting very far. Suggested a configuration out of the book, showed him how it would help meet his needs, and soon had a happy designer back on his way...

Charlie
.

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