The EECS BlogThe Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Blog
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Here you’ll find products or services I have bought, used, or owned at some point. This might include books, tools, accessories, kits, or components I used and would recommend buying. Some books or product models/versions might be out of production by now. In such cases, I might list their later editions or replacement/successor products from the same company/author. If you’re not from the USA, Amazon might redirect you to your local Amazon marketplace(de, uk, …). If the linked product isn’t available there it might get replaced with some other similar product!
I haven’t really read a huge amount of books in the last 15 years since I’ve been into electronics/computers/software. The reason is I don’t really like the book format and I much prefer watching multiple different videos or reading blog posts on a specific topic. Videos on YouTube are free, I can watch them at 2x speed and I feel like listening for me happens automatically while reading takes conscious effort. I especially prefer tutorials in a video format as I find it much easier and faster to watch someone do something compared to it being described with text and some images.
Nonetheless here are some of the books I did read, I liked or found useful and would recommend to you.
Getting Stated With Arduino
A great book for absolute beginners to learn about Arduino. I bought the first edition of this book almost 15 years ago(at the time of writing). This is how I actually got my first experience of programming anything.
Microsoft Visual C# Step by Step
Great C# reference book. I originaly read the 2012 edition.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
A very popular and praised book in the software engineering community. It covers some fundamental software design patterns. However, I don’t recommend this for beginners. I think you should have a bit of programming experience before you read it.
Modern Operating Systems
Great book for learning about operations systems. I think every programmer should at some point learn a bit more about how their programs are run and managed(processes, threads, memory) by the operating system.
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach
This is an awesome book on computer architecture but it definitely requires some pre-existing knowledge about programming and computers at a lower level else I think you will struggle reading it.
Digital Computer Electronics
I got this book(a later version of it) as per a recommendation from Ben Eater in his video series on making an 8-bit breadboard computer. I recreated the 8-bit computer he made on a breadboard inside of an FPGA. Here’s a series of blog posts about this project of mine. This book will teach you all the basic things you need to make a simple computer.
Here are some of the other editions or variants of the same book. I personally got/read the Digital Computer Electronics (Third Edition) and the Digital Principles And Applications (Seventh Edition) books.
Digital Design and Computer Architecture
A great book about digital logic design and computer engineering.
Digital Design and Computer Architecture: RISC-V Edition
I’m currently also reading this version as I am interested in RISC-V and I’m currently in the process of making a RISC-V CPU in Verilog inside of an FPGA.
Digital Design and Computer Architecture: ARM Edition
And here’s an ARM oriented version of the same book if you are more interested in that.
The Art of Electronics
I don’t recommend this book for beginners to learn about electronics. But for anyone past that point, it’s absolutely amazing as a reference book. It covers a wide variety of electronics topics/equations/components/circuits.
Getting Started in Electronics
Now this book is actually very good for absolute beginners. It’s quite short(a bit more than 100 pages) and covers the very basics of electronics. I’ve always liked the unique hand-drawn diagrams and handwritten text aesthetic of this book.
Basic Electricity: Complete Course Volumes 1-5
Just like the previous book this one is great for beginners and it also has very nice illustrations with that distinct 50s vibe to them. It is however a bit longer and goes a bit more in depth than the previous book.
Other
A Brief History of Time
This is one of the few books I read(voluntarily) and liked that isn’t about electronics, computers or software. It’s not directly related to the topic of this blog but it’s an interesting read if you like science and physics.
The Universe in a Nutshell
This is a sequel/follow-up to the previous book “A Brief History of Time”.
