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I totally agree. H&H (AoE) is the bible. It is the standard reference everyone uses. But, it is also way overkill if all you want is how to make something work. There are lots of other options out there. My personal choice is "Circuit Design for Electronic Instrumentation" by Darold Wobschall, ISBN:978-0070712300. I like it because most of the time I'm interested in hooking up sensors of various sorts to a micro, for which this book is a perfect fit. It does a great job of explaining the vast majority of the basic stuff you might want to use.

The one caveat is that it is old. So it is not going to have things like spread spectrum (cell phone). Fortunately, most of the basics haven't really changed in over 30 years.

With amazon, you just need to copy the URL so far as the ISBN. The later stuff is information about your personal site visit and the referrer ID. So all you need is

http://www.amazon.com/Bebop-Boolean-Boogie-Unconventional-Electronics/dp/0750675438.

or even just
  http://www.amazon.com/dp/0750675438. .

With amazon, you just need to copy the URL so far as the ISBN. The later stuff is information about your personal site visit and the referrer ID. So all you need is

http://www.amazon.com/Bebop-Boolean-Boogie-Unconventional-Electronics/dp/0750675438.

or even just
  http://www.amazon.com/dp/0750675438. .

I agree, if you're looking to master electronics AoE is a fantastic choice. If you want to get your hands dirty quick I'd recommend something like Practical Electronics for Inventors.

You can always return to AoE when you're ready.

not to push amazon, but was looking the publishers site and found this first

http://www.amazon.com/Active-Filter-Cookbook-Second-LANCASTER/dp/075062986X

see other books mentioned

or for something a bit simpler there is Electronic Music Learning Projects. Slightly more basic circuits for making noises and very, very simple keyboards.

AofE (sitting right in reach as I type) is probably the "standard" recomendation. One problem with it. It's perfect if you already KNOW the material, and a real DOG to learn from, but a perfect "second book" or "Gee, I can't remember how to...

I's actually say get
Elelectricity - Principlas and Applications http://www.amazon.com/Electricity-Principles-Applications-Richard-Fowler/dp/0078262860/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210161568&sr=8-1

and as a second book "Electronics - Principles and Applications" (well this seems to be what replaced it) http://www.amazon.com/Electronics-Principles-Applications-Experiments-Manual/dp/002804245X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210161865&sr=1-3

another good one - go to ARRL.ORG and get

Understanding Basic Electronics

AofE (sitting right in reach as I type) is probably the "standard" recomendation. One problem with it. It's perfect if you already KNOW the material, and a real DOG to learn from, but a perfect "second book" or "Gee, I can't remember how to...

I's actually say get
Elelectricity - Principlas and Applications http://www.amazon.com/Electricity-Principles-Applications-Richard-Fowler/dp/0078262860/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210161568&sr=8-1

and as a second book "Electronics - Principles and Applications" (well this seems to be what replaced it) http://www.amazon.com/Electronics-Principles-Applications-Experiments-Manual/dp/002804245X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210161865&sr=1-3

another good one - go to ARRL.ORG and get

Understanding Basic Electronics

If you want something more on the practical side, emphasizing (but not limited to) radio techniques, you could look at The ARRL Handbook for Radio Communications. It's a great reference book.

The way I started as a kid back in the late '70s was by playing with TTL parts from Radio Shack.

First, get a solderless breadboard and some 22ga solid wire. Then get a 555 chip, some resistors and capacitors, and hook it up. To drive an 8 ohm speaker, use a 100uf capacitor, and to drive an LED use a 270-470 ohm resistor. And find a 5 volt brick to power it. (That was the tricky part back in the day... getting my parents to be okay with me building a 7805-based power supply that actually plugged into the wall.)

Then get the TTL Cookbook, and some TTL chips (mainly 74LS00, 74LS02, 74LS04, 74LS74, 74LS90, 74LS93 for the basic stuff, and maybe a 7447/7448 and a 7-segment LED) and 4.7K resistors for pull-ups, and start playing around. Blinkenlights projects can be pretty fun.

Let me second this one by saying that I started with it when I was seven. It was the "intro" book they were selling at Radio Shack back before radio shack changed their logo from "You've got questions, we've got answers" to "You've got questions, we've got blank stares" - i.e., when they were still employing electricians.

It looks a bit different than it did when I read it.

Note that what you'll be able to do when you understand the stuff in this book is very little. You'll be able to make tone generators, and blinking lights.

What good is that? Well, given a basic microcontroller, you'll probably learn enough basic electronics sense to not burn out any of your components, and you'll probably learn enough to be able to read other people's circuit schematics.

That may be all you need of the electronics part to start you down into the exciting world of digital signal processing without a computer, which I have always thought of as the exciting part.

You were just one google away from providing real information:
http://www.amazon.com/Electronics-Dummies-Gordon-McComb/dp/0764576607

I actually read it and it is an easy read and imo a good introduction. Designing robots etc are not really part of the book, but information from the real basics up to and including designing boards, experimenting with bread boards etc. are in there

I've worn out one copy of AoE, and still use it regularly - I'd also recommend it, but it's a reference book rather than a gently read. If you want to get your hands dirty and actually build something, try the Robot Builder's Bonanza. It's much less technical, but full of good ideas. I've never built any of the projects from the book, but it has inspired lots of my own.

For the musically inclined electronics noob I recommend Craig Anderton's Electronic Projects for Musicians.

The book goes through all the basics: making and repairing your own cables, soldering, working with metal and plexiglass chassis, various types of boards(breadboards, etching). Projects are of varying difficulty and include a headphone amp, miniamp, fuzz-tone, "ring" modulator and phase shifter(the most difficult). Most projects use battery power and are safe to build and operate(note: unfortunately, none of the projects are synths.)

Maybe not your cup of tea but more fun to reuse than a run of the mill blinkenlighter.

Use the html anchor tag - ie Your text here . You don't really need the quotation marks around the URL, but it won't hurt to use them either.

You'd end up with Bebop Boolean Boogie Unconventional Electronics

Tada! :p

There are No Electrons: Electronics for Idiots is extremely basic, but its entertainment value is inestimable and it's really quite profound on the basics. You'll never feel like you understand the fundamentals better.

I recommend Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers by Tom Igoe and Dan O'Sullivan. The title of the book itself doesn't sound all that appealing, but this is the book you want. It will teach you all the little tricks that seasoned practitioners know, but that most books won't even tell you about. Other guides I have found useful are the old Radio Shack notebooks. I'm not sure how they're called, or where you'd get them legally. I haven't seen them at Radio Shack and I do not know if they're still in print.

And last, I have to plug this TechShop establishment since they offer classes at very reasonable rates and they were kind enough to host our Ruby Hackfest in their awesome space last month.

I recommend this annoyingly named book, which is an excellent cover-all on this and related subjects. Really did join the dots for me many years ago and it looks like it's now in its 2nd edition.

http://www.amazon.com/Bebop-Boolean-Boogie-Unconventional-Electronics/dp/0750675438/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210145164&sr=1-1

(Any grammar nazi's able to show me how to tidy up that link? Or point me at the right place on here to find out please?)

An excellent starter is "The Art of Electronics By Paul Horowitz, Horowitz, Winfield Hill"

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Paul-Horowitz/dp/0521370957

You should also have a look at the classic:
"Foundations of Wireless and Electronics
by M.G. Scroggie "

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Foundations-Wireless-Electronics-M-G-Scroggie/dp/0750634308

Just what everyone in the world was clamoring for: games for their camera.

While games are a nice gimmick that gets the project attention, it looks like there are real features here. Me, after I lost my old Powershot I bought in 2004, I got a new Powershot A550. I was unhappy, however, to see that it had even less features than the old Powershot. Instead of trickling whizbang features down into cheaper cameras over time, Canon has been getting rid of them altogether. Now, one missing feature is hardware, the swivel viewfinder, and I can't do anything to remedy that. Similarly, I cannot use the camera as a webcam with a few hacks like I could the old one. However, this open firmware project will restore my precious RAW capabilities. It will also give me longer exposure times that I've long craved.

Peter Gabriel isn't the first musician to be a victim of equipment theft. Earlier in the millennium BT and Hybrid suffered major setbacks in the making of long-awaited new albums when their computers were stolen. I remember being royally pissed when Hybrid's Morning Sci-Fi , already generating a lot of buzz based on the band's material at concerts, was delayed years just because some dumbass saw shiny electronics in a studio and walked off with them.

The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush... You are leaning back against a post that may or may not be structural with regard to the building, but which feels essential to your own maintenance of any upright position.

This book by Lawrence Kraus http://www.amazon.com/Atom-Single-Oxygen-Journey-Earth/dp/0316183091/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210017388&sr=8-2 is a very good. The book is simple enough you can understand it, and probably help your child understand it as well. The thing that I have been confounded by with my kids is that the concept of lots is kind of difficult for them to grasp. A lot of jelly beans they get, but the concept of 100,000, or 1 million, much less 1 billion is just beyond their ability at 8 or 10 years old. They will nod their heads, but with probing, I find that they don't really "get" how many that is. On top of it being a good book to read with your kid, it is a good book to read and you will get some pretty cool amount of info in there present in a somewhat entertaining way. I wouldn't sick my kids on this book without me, but we will probably read it together in the very near future (since we finished Ender's game....)

Sir, I present your new favorite book!

The second-person POV is not common in literary fiction

Besides the very fun first chapter Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler... , I don't know any literary fiction that uses such a perspective. Maybe someone here can come up with other examples?

Paul Griffiths uses the second person in The Sea on Fire , his biography of Jean Barraque, the 20th century modernist composer and Michel Foucault's lover. The book is written as if Griffiths were addressing Barraque, and it's obnoxious as all get out. One wonders why his editor at the university press that published it allowed it.

The second-person POV is not common in literary fiction

Besides the very fun first chapter Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler... , I don't know any literary fiction that uses such a perspective. Maybe someone here can come up with other examples?

Paul Griffiths uses the second person in The Sea on Fire , his biography of Jean Barraque, the 20th century modernist composer and Michel Foucault's lover. The book is written as if Griffiths were addressing Barraque, and it's obnoxious as all get out. One wonders why his editor at the university press that published it allowed it.

Also available from Amazon and for rental through NetFlix.

Try this 180 minutes video from BBC. It was made in 2001. ISBN: 0-7907-6610-8 The science seems to fit, the special effects (for the explanation) are realy nice and they keep it simple! It's cheap (about 20$) You will have more detail at this adress: http://www.amazon.com/Hyperspace/dp/B000060MTY

But can that excrement allow humans to see the future and travel faster than light?

If you don't get it, the OP is a reference to Frank Herbert's novel Dune where the chemical produced by the sandwords of the desert planet Arrakis proved the key to faster-than-light travel by giving starship steersmen superhuman powers.

While I admire Herbert's creation of a science fiction novel based on modern studies of desert ecology, I felt the whole spice deal weakened the hard sci-fi goodness of what otherwise would have been a less fantastical book.

I wonder how far away fully automated surgical systems, the "autodocs" of Larry Niven stories like Crashlander , are. While there are no doubt many dangers involved, an automated system would be better for nothing when it comes to things like removing appendixes when the local human doctor is dead or incapacitated.

I just order the book "Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution". It is aimed at six to ten year olds. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0618164766/ref=ord_cart_shr?_encoding=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance

Doesn't the setting remind anyone of this.

you know terrorist springing everywhere around the world, olympic games comming in a place where disease outbreak doesn't surprise anybody, security firm hired to protect the stuff, spreading pandemic instead. I do hope ex-kgb agent aren't environementalist and still like money.

"but when you go to the Linux section and look for "How to Program Linux" you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist."

Um I have TWO sitting on my shelf NOW!

"Linux Programmer's Reference" By Richard Peterson from Osbourne Press
http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Programmers-Reference-Richard-Petersen/dp/0072123559/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209819648&sr=1-1

"Beginning Linux Programming" By Neil Matthew & Richard Stones from Wrox Press
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Linux-Programming-Neil-Matthew/dp/0470147628/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209819712&sr=1-1

Care to rephrase that Darl? Or are you taking a chapter out of Hillary Clinton's book?

"but when you go to the Linux section and look for "How to Program Linux" you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist."

Um I have TWO sitting on my shelf NOW!

"Linux Programmer's Reference" By Richard Peterson from Osbourne Press
http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Programmers-Reference-Richard-Petersen/dp/0072123559/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209819648&sr=1-1

"Beginning Linux Programming" By Neil Matthew & Richard Stones from Wrox Press
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Linux-Programming-Neil-Matthew/dp/0470147628/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1209819712&sr=1-1

Care to rephrase that Darl? Or are you taking a chapter out of Hillary Clinton's book?

When it comes to contemporary repertoire, the more "robotic" the conductor, the better the performance. This is because usually composers try to write exactly how their music should sound, extending the notation if necessary, instead of leaving it up to the judgement of the conductor, who might come up with something completely different. In Per Norgard's Symphony No. 3 , for instance, the whole effect of the music is based on as close an adherence to the golden section as is humanly possible by the performers, and a conductor who plays what he sees without adding in any extraneous phrasing is desirable. In Elliott Carter's mature music, balancing all the tempos properly is extremely difficult for a human conductor.

I don't foresee ASIMO replacing human conductors permanently, but I suspect that any performance he conducted of modern works would sound better than those by conductors trained like Bernstein or Karajan, who tried to make the music fit their own universal style instead of following the wishes of the composer.

Okay, but if you try the corresponding search for UNIX, you do get 2768 results, whereas the "programming linux" search gets you "only" 1648 items. Of course, there is probably a large area of overlap between, and it doesn't negate the fact that Darl would be spectacularly wrong for any, oh, post 2000 date.

when you go to the Linux section and look for "How to Program Linux" you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist.

A quick search on Amazon of the phrase "Linux programming" returns 1,648 results.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=linux+programming&x=0&y=0

can someone say "no due diligence?"

I propose that IBM, Novell, or the Slashdot community in general go online and order one of EACH LINUX PROGRAMMING BOOK and send it to the court courtroom/judge on this case shipped directly from Amazon.com. Or maybe have IBM deliver a TRUCKLOAD of books to the court? Someone needs to set up a system to ensure that exactly one of each book (rather than a million duplicates of the first 10 matches on Amazon) gets sent. This will show the pathetic absurdity of this "expert" witness on the non-existence of Linux programming books.

here on amazon. 1,648 results for linux programming.

someone please introduce mr. mcbride to something al gore invented in early 90's called "the internet".

http://www.amazon.com/s/103-0810819-1417433?ie=UTF8&tag=mozilla-20&index=blended&link_code=qs&field-keywords=linux%20programming&sourceid=Mozilla-search brings up a list of 16 books from likes of Wrox, Prentice Hall, O'Reilly and even a "For Dummies" book.

when you go to the Linux section and look for "How to Program Linux" you're not gonna find it, because it doesn't exist.

It did take me about 15 seconds to find a good link for this one: http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Programming-White-Papers-Compilation/dp/1576104737

Although in all fairness, this does not fit in the "can find a post-worthy link in under 15 seconds on the first attempt" category and so may not qualify. Or perhaps this book doesn't count because it is a compilation of many pieces on "How to Program Linux", rather than a single original work.

But then, I tend to look for the simple explanation; he took a few too many shots to the head when playing football in high school.

You want some real irony? Do the same search with the word Caldera included.

That is one bare-faced lie.

I alway thought this guy was a fucking moron but this pretty much seals the deal.

Linux programming books

Oooh, me too, me too!

Somewhere around here (or rather there, since I am here and not there, where there is home), I have a copy of LINUX Programming by Patrick Volkerding and others, dated 1996.

It was a good book, although the content is mostly irrelevant now. I do miss the simplicity that was Linux way back then, y'know, back when it was feasible to fit an entire distribution on a dozen 1.44 MB floppies.

I realize this is a bit redundant now, but Darl, you're a fuckin' idiot.

I don't know about How to Program Linux, but there's this record in my library's catalog for Linux programming by example, by Kurt Wall (2000), and here's The Linux Kernel Book, by Remy Card, Eric Dumas, and Franck Mevel (1998).

• one
• two

• should i continue? or is there already abundant proof out there that darl is a lying sack of shit?

I believe the easiest option for Amazon would be to simply drop all affiliates in New York. Refusing to sell to New York is financial suicide for them, but dropping all affiliates wouldn't cause too much grief from the public.

Perhaps this is part of the motivation behind Amazon's Kindle device. If you're not sending something through the mail to an address in a specific state, but instead providing an electronic file to someone without any physical merchandise involved, wouldn't that mean state tax laws were much less of an (enforceable) threat and the company would no longer fear states like New York?

I am not a Harry Potter aficionado. I've never read a book in the series. This topic has been sufficiently raked over the coals from a legal perspective by people who know better than me.

I do know that derivation is one source of creativity. It's a tricky source - get too formulaic + too derivative while writing a song or a story, and it can bomb out the original idea.

This can even be true for authoring or reading /. posts. Most days, my eyes roll on the classic 1.xxxx 2.yyyy 3.??? 4.Profit!, but every once in a while, i"m knee slapping from the gut up.

Derivative works *can* be nothing but a cultural drag/dupe. However, they also can be a support for the interested reader, an impetus for a whole 'culture of xxx' thing that creates a previously unimagined phenomena.

I read the lexicon site for a while tonight. It's pretty damn cool (but I like that sort of thing (shameless plug for Simon Winchester and the OED).

I don't care how much money Rowling has already made - meaningless to me. I only care that she made the characters and settings up should someone appropriate the characters for the writing of another fictional story in a similar setting.

However, a work which slices and dices the facts, foibles & follies of an existing fictional story must, by definition, overlap the detail and content of the original work. That's what it is all *about*.

More importantly, it affords an opportunity for the author's work to step out front of the cultural curtain and make their work not just a story, but a view into the cultural details of our present-day world. Foolish to skip out on that one ...

Rolwings is missing a major opportunity here, perhaps on the bad advice of a lawyer obliged, by a crappy IP law landscape, to offer a good legal interpretation. Major bummer, but at the end of the day she's the one making the money call rather than the cultural call.

The song can be found on the live That Was The Week That Was album, which my parents played incessantly back in the mid-60s, no doubt a major corrupting influence on my preschooler mind. For a great and never-more-topical view on... um... "democracy-spreading", "Send the Marines" is a classic.