An excellent site for Old Books and Magazines in PDF format

[top204]

I have just come across an excellent site that has many, many thousands of older books and magazines to download.

It is a ligitimate site, and is just like archive.org, but also has many other books on it, and it better laid out. IMO.

https://www.pdfdrive.com

I have had a passion for electronics books since I was a crawling babe, and I learned to read, pre-school, in the dining room of our house surrounded by dad's old Practical Electronics and Practical Wireless and Practical Mechanics magazines from the 1950s to the 1960's, he used to keep in the sideboard unit in there. I think it was the constant questions in my mind that made me want to read and understand as soon as I could. LOL I still remember asking him what a zener diode was, but I had never heard it pronounced, so I used to call it a "zeener" diode. :-) I must have been about 6 or 7 years old.

The downloaded books are wonderful to view, but "nothing" beats a real book in your hand, and reading on the toilet or in bed. LOL. I still remember reading mine, and dad's, electronics books and magazines in bed as a boy, using a battery and a bulb under the bed covers, so mum and dad thought I was asleep. :-) I also, normally, had a crystal earphone in my ear and listening to the radio on the latest radio I could build with the parts we had in the shed. I still remember my first two transistor regen radio... It was like magic was happening on the piece of vero strip-board when the regen coil was moved closer the the tuning coil for the positive feedback to occur. :-)

Wonderful memories.

[JonW]

I loved reading EPE.  Learnt electronics through that mag.
Also started using Pics on the 54 and the flash f84 with a magenta programmer and ASM.  Still remember when you packed space invaders and a GLCD into such a tiny chip, blew my mind at the time in the power of the compiler and the efficiency.  Never looked back and use the compiler to this day.
 
I even  use the compiler for the low end chinese mcu that are similar.  Write for the pic and study the asm to get the best compressed code and convert. 

[Gary Scott]

Actually some of the books are fairly recent, like 5 to 7 years old,  I'm looking at Python books and seeing this.

[midali]

Another site with many old publications :

Worldradiohistory

[keytapper]

I like reading, but my character won't perseverate to complete a book  I'm rather lazy to read the manual first, too 

On the other hand, I would exclude old books that are mentioning high technology, E.G. electronics and programming. That mentioned technology may cause obsolete choices for new hobbyist projects, as badly maintained web sites doing.

[top204]

That mentioned technology may cause obsolete choices for new hobbyist projects

That is not always the case.... A transistor is still a transistor even 80 years from when they were first created, so is an op-amp and a diode and a microprocessor etc.... Radio is still radio, even if most people do not actually know that "digital radio" is still "old fashioned radio" with all of its AC theory and bouncing and querks. LOL

Building a crystal diode radio is one of the wonders of first learning, then moving up through the stages to TRF, reflex, regen, so an understanding of oscillation and amplification are learned. Or making an LED illuminate when it gets dark using a single transistor etc... The same with digital logic. Making a simple circuit to understand logic gates and toggle LEDs is fascinating. Then move up to the more complex circuits and ideas. This method is "real" learning.

Personally, I think people learn more from the older generation circuits and explanations because they were more detailed and copying/pasting did not really exist, unless you were some of the guest writers in the magazines that churned out the same stuff over and over again word for word, year after year, i.e. Marston, Penfold etc, with "how an op-amp works", or "transistor amplifiers" or "transistor oscillators" etc....

Modern texts and articles are mostly nonsense and the modern magazines such as Hackaday and the others of the same format, are worthless pieces of paper with nothing in them at all except ego trippers that insist on having their selfies with their copying and pasting and very poorly written texts based on "I think this is how it works, so it must be right because I am a genius and never wrong so don't forget to subscribe to me so I can make more money for my ignorance" mannerisms, LOL.