It’s a book featuring macro photographs of cut-aways of electronic components. It’s the first book that helped me really think of electronic components as a physical things whose function followed from physical principles, rather than an arcane collection of various bits of black magic strung together.
I agree! I kinda know nothing about electronics since "my first electronic kit" as a 8 year old, and that book of cutaways shocked me as how many things in my computer aren't nanoscale magic!
Windell Oskay & Eric Schlaepfer's book has brilliant photographs and insightful text ... a coffee table book to delight any techie. They slice through connectors, semiconductors, and components ... showing the wonderful microscopic world of everyday electronics. A real joy!
High-speed digital and RF are more "magical" than a lot of other forms of electronics. It is quite a bit more approachable if you limit yourself to ~200 MHz signals at most, then you don't really have to worry about the RF properties of your circuits as long as you keep the wires pretty short.
It’s a beautiful demonstration of how increasing one parameter (frequency) can successively invalidate whatever model you’re using for the system, where negligible errors in the model eventually become functional circuit components.
