Keith wrote:
When you talk about courses via the web, are you referring to stuff
like MIT's OCW, or ?
yes, exactly.
Is this by Mark Gordon Arnold from 1998? I always
wonder about older
books. If they are the defacto reference standard, it's one thing. I
sometimes think that if they are generic enough to still apply, it's
not specific enough to my boards/environment/current language
standards to help.
I don't think the fundamentals of logic design have changed
in the last
50 years. Others may disagree. Metastability is still
metastability. And Mealy and Moore have not changed (not since the
1950's). No one does logic reduction by hand any more, but you should
learn how to do it anyway (my opinion), since will cement some important
concepts in your mind.
If I'm working on classic computer stuff, then
much of material is
old, so then the associated books are old too.
I would not worry about age. The
things that have changed don't matter
to you (yet). Basically things just go faster
and there are a lot more transistors. But the fundamentals are the same
on a 1970 pdp-11 and 2010 Pentium. The
clock domain crossing problems which occured in 1970 still happen today
(trust me, I just spent all of last week
helping debug some domain crossing issues on an FPGA).
From what I have seen, logic design books like "Mick and Brick" are
still as valid today as they were when they
where written.
Now I will make one caveat. A lot of the early DEC designs used pulse
or asynchronous logic. I would avoid
that. I would stick with completely synchronous design. So, if you are
reading an old book and it talks about
async design, I'd skip that part. Certainly anything from Mick & Brick
on is fully synchronous.
-brad