These books and all related files are published under the terms and conditions of the Design Science License. These terms and conditions allow for free copying, distribution, and/or modification of this document by the general public.
A copy of the Design Science License is included at the end of each book volume. For more information about the License, visit http://www.dsl.org/
As an open and collaboratively developed text, this book is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the Design Science License for more details.
| Book Volume: | Volume I - DC | Volume II - AC | Volume III - Semiconductors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Edition: | 5th | 5th | 4th |
| Last revised: | January 4, 2003 | November 24, 2002 | December 16, 2002 |
| Book Volume: | Volume IV - Digital | Volume V - Reference | Volume VI - Experiments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Edition: | 4th | 4th | 1st |
| Last revised: | June 29, 2002 | June 29, 2002 | July 21, 2002 |
Edition numbers reflect major structural changes to a book volume such as the addition of new chapters, the substantial expansion of existing chapters, or a change in markup language (source code formatting). I may also increment the edition number of a volume due to the accumulation of many smaller changes. For a volume under active revision, one edition per year is normal.
"Last revised" dates reflect non-trivial changes only. Minor changes such as typographical error correction and stylistic changes to the text do not warrant increments to this date. New topics added to the text, as well as any outside contributions, are the minimum change level warranting a new revision date.
The source code for each chapter file contains a change-log consisting of commented lines, which is normally hidden when viewed by a web browser. You may peruse the beginning of each chapter file (using the "view page source" option on your browser) for a detailed history of all changes to that chapter.
Note to instructors:
My commitment to those using these texts as student resources in instructional curricula is to never delete subject matter content as the books evolve through succeeding revisions and editions. New subjects will be added, and existing subjects expanded in coverage, but I will never omit "old" subjects. My experience is that even "obsolete" subjects in electronics hold important lessons for students, and sometimes serve to catalyze creativity in new design work. Unlike publishers, who must consider the page count (printing costs) of a book, my publication costs are zero. Instructors may pattern their lesson plans around the subjects contained in this book series without being forced to change their plans as the series matures.
Over the last year or so, I've received a few requests for the books' format to be changed from "electron flow" notation to "conventional flow" notation, the way most engineering texts show current. The only reason the books were written with electron flow notation is due to the politics of the institution at which I teach. It would require a lot of work to change all illustrations and descriptions to conventional flow notation, and what I need to know from you readers is, is this something you really want done? Is there anyone out there who prefers electron flow notation? One thing I will not do is maintain two versions of the book, one in electron flow and the other in conventional flow notation. The decision needs to be one or the other. Please email me with your opinions at: liec0@lycos.com
Thanks to Am Ax for pointing out an HTML formatting error on this page (improper formatting of the "less than" < symbol).
Thanks to Dejan Budimir, whose correspondence led to the addition of another example circuit in the Mesh Current Method section of chapter 10 of volume 1. Hopefully now, a confusing subject has been made a little less confusing!
Thanks to Jered Wierzbicki, who pointed out an error in the diode equation shown in chapter 3 (Diodes and Rectifiers) of the Semiconductors volume. I had shown Boltzmann's constant incorrectly (1.38 x 10-22 instead of 1.38 x 10-23 as it should have been shown).
Edition number of the Semiconductor volume has been incremented from 3rd to 4th, in honor of all the improvements made between January 2002 and December 2002.
Thanks again to Bill Heath, who pointed out several typographical errors in the DC network analysis chapter. Even "minor" contributions such as this are very important to the overall quality of the book(s).
Edition number of the AC volume has been incremented from 4th to 5th, in honor of all the improvements made between November 2001 and November 2002.
For those who care about such things, the SubML markup language has been updated to include basic Latin characters (letters with circumflexes, tildes, cedillas, and all those other marks common in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and other languages). See the developer's section on markup languages for detailed information.
Thank-you to Bill Heath, who pointed out my inability to count to six properly! (My illustration of a carbon atom had seven protons in the nucleus instead of six like it was supposed to.)
A big thank-you to Warren Young, who submitted both new capacitor photographs for chapter 13 of volume 1 (according to the "To-do" list), and also a few paragraphs of text for a new "Power supply circuits" section in chapter 9 of volume 3.
<--- Click Here!
All volumes! HTML code plus graphic images in JPEG format -- about 36 megabytes in size, in .tar.gz format
<--- Click Here!
All volumes! One file (liecsrc.tar) containing *src.tar.gz files for each volume. Each of these gzipped .tar archives contains all the makefiles, conversion scripts, SubML text source, image libraries, and graphic images (all formats) needed to compile each volume. About 100 megabytes in its entirety.
<--- Click Here!
All volumes! One file (liectiny.tar) containing *tiny.tar.gz files for each volume. The difference between this source code package and the one shown above is that this package contains only one format type for each image (EPS for schematics and illustrations, JPG for photographs), instead of both formats (EPS and JPG) for all images. This archive is much smaller (because the omitted EPS photographic image files are huge!), but requires that you do a lot of image file conversion to produce either HTML or PostScript/PDF output. About 8 megabytes in its entirety.
GNU/Linux operating system: 
(what else?)
Vim text editor: 
Xcircuit drafting program for illustrations, tables, charts, and equations: 
Gimp graphics manipulation program (a Photoshop clone): 
Miscellaneous UNIX utilities, obtainable from the Free Software Foundation: 
You can download an Microsoft Windows executable of the sed utility, necessary for processing source files for the type of markup language used in this book project, here.
Spice version 2G6, a public-domain program used to simulate analog circuits. Download a statically-linked executable for Linux systems here (spice), or the following three files for execution on MS-DOS systems: spice.exe, 32rtm.exe, and dpmi32vm.ovl (keep these three files in the same directory).
Any submissions, comments, or good jokes? Send them to: liec0@lycos.com Bear in mind that my new work assignment for the 2002-2003 teaching year will keep me very busy, and unable to respond to email messages as promptly as in the past. Please be patient! Hopefully, all will return to normal in July 2003, and I will be able to continue development of incomplete and pending sections/chapters.
If you are submitting a suggestion for improving the book(s), no matter how small, remember that I will add your name to the list of contributors. I would like to include your contact information (email address) in the contributor list, if you wouldn't mind, so please let me know if you would like your email address shown by your name. If you do not grant explicit permission to show your email address, then I will assume you do not want it shown, and I will only list your name.