How to get a broad overview of the world of electronics

digital-logiceducation

(Feel free to edit the question's title. Wasn't sure of a good one liner for my question)

I'm a university student who has found a love for electronics and circuit design. I have a solid knowledge of the basics of logic design (worked with logic gates, created ALUs, created registers, stuff like that). I found this SE site and started reading a lot of the top voted questions, which helped a whole lot. However, when reading most of the questions here, I find myself completely lost.

I think this is because of my limited scope and knowledge of the world of electronics. There are a lot of acronyms thrown around (IC, FPGA, MCU, etc) and most of them have little relevance to what I already know. I think hardware programming is awesome, but where does it happen? What do you program?

So, I guess my question is this: How can I visualize the world of electronics and where is the next logical (no pun intended) step for someone at my level? Where does circuit logic (NAND, NOR, etc) fit into all this?

Best Answer

Get the Art of Electronics, by Horowitz & Hill. Don't wait for the third edition, just get the second edition. Any decent bookshop should have it.

http://frank.harvard.edu/aoe/

It's fun and easy to read, gives an unparalleled overview of basic electronics, and most importantly for you ties it all together so you know where everything fits.

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