Favorite Data Books

[Paganini]

When you order 74 series ICs from DigiKey (or wherever) you typically get a link to a PDF datasheet, invariably one of the recent TI ones. I'm getting really tired of printing them out and shuffling them around. Also, I don't really like the TI sheets. The pins have weird names and the descriptive text is poorly written. I want to get a vintage 74 series data book that I can just plunk down on the bench next to my project and put thumb tabs in. Some of them are a bit pricey - for example, $50 for the 1988 74HC databook from TI! I know Garth as a whole stack of vintage data books, and I suspect others do too. Before I pony up my hard-earned beer money I'm curious to know which ones stand out as particularly well done.

[AndrewP]

The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill has a chapter (10 I think) on the various 74 series ICs. It's well worth a read if you need a reference manual. It's not as detailed as a datasheet for a specific IC but has good general information on the various logic families. I still print out datasheets so I can have them next to me when I'm working; somehow a monitor is just not the same.

[GARTHWILSON]

I have about 50 shelf-feet of electronics data books, catalogs, manuals, etc.. The ones I refer to most often are the National Semiconductor (NSC) data books from about the late 1980's to 1995. In spite of their age, the logic ones do cover up to 74F, 74FR (almost twice as fast as 74F, 2.5 times the speed of 74ALS), 74ALS, 74AS, 74ABT, 74ACT, 74ACTQ, 74FCT, 74LVT, 74LCX, 74LVX, 74LVQ, 74LVT, 74LVXC, 74LVX3V3, 74VHC, 74VHCT, and of course the older 74xx, 74L, 74LS, 74HC, 74HCT, 74C, and 4000. I refer to the NSC analog ones a lot too. These blue books are all NSC:

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Before I pony up my hard-earned beer money I'm curious to know which ones stand out as particularly well done.

I'd say my most useful logic data book is the thick CMOS Logic one. Mine is from 1988. It covers 74HC, 74HCT, 74C, and 4000 (but note that 4000-series parts are too slow for most of what you probably want to do; I use it for slow 12V stuff). It has a lot of great ap. notes in it too. When you want faster parts, you could use the online data sheets just to look up the speeds and drive capabilities, but keep this book handy for the pinouts, descriptions, truth tables, logic diagrams, logic waveforms, etc..

I got these before we had the internet and manufacturers gave out their data books like AOL CD-ROMs (remember those?) to engineers in the industry, hoping that they'd design the parts into their products and make for a lot of sales. So I didn't pay for any of these. (TI was not nearly as generous or helpful as NSC though; so guess whose parts I used!) I don't know where you would get these books today. It might be a used-book store, library sale (including from technical schools), someone retiring and getting rid of much of their stuff, etc.. You'll probably just have to keep an eye out for them. I haven't looked on eBay or Amazon.

I totally agree that the paper is friendlier. Dave Jones of the EEVblog went kind of hard on this, saying, "Why would you keep all those old books taking up space when it's all online now." The books are great for making your own notes in, posting your yellow stickies, etc., and are faster to flip to desired parts, and don't require you to keep changing windows on the screen. Further, NSC spun off their logic stuff to Fairchild, and later, TI acquired NSC and said, "Oh, we have this part too, with data sheets, so we can dump NSC's data sheets" (and Fairchild was acquired by ON Semi); but NSC's were more clear and had better application information than TI. I'm very glad I kept the old ones!! TI acquired and ruined several other companies too; and its technical customer service is lousy compared to what NSC's was. On the modern stuff, I always have to print the data sheets I'm going to be getting into heavily. On a complex microcontroller or Bluetooth module, that might be two or three hundred pages or even more; and then I put them in a loose-leaf binder, which doesn't handle as well as a normal soft-cover book.

[Paganini]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

When you want faster parts, you could use the online data sheets just to look up the speeds, but keep this book handy for the pinouts, descriptions, truth tables, logic diagrams, logic waveforms, etc..

This is exactly what I was thinking. Having useful period app notes that I can sit down in a chair and read, instead of trying to juggle PDFs, is also a plus.

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I got these before we had the internet and manufacturers gave out their data books like AOL CD-ROMs (remember those?)

Ai! Ai! A balrog is come!

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I don't know where you would get these books today. It might be a used-book store, library sale (including from technical schools), someone retiring and getting rid of much of their stuff, etc.. You'll probably just have to keep an eye out for them. I haven't looked on eBay or Amazon.

I'm pretty decent at rustling up used books on various web-sites. I'll keep an eye out for those NSC data books. There are definitely some on eBay; but I wasn't sure if they covered 74 series or just 4000 series, because the description just said "CMOS." Now I know!

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Dave Jones of the EEVblog went kind of hard on this, saying, "Why would you keep all those old books taking up space when it's all online now."

This is not my way.

In addition to the advantages you mention, a lot of my TI printouts don't have page numbers or title headers, so when a whole stack falls off of my bench, I can't tell which pages go together, or what order they go on!

[BillO]

I used to have a few dozen of the National data books, but alas most of them got misplaced/lost during a move about 30 years ago.

I like books.

What I do today is print out some relevant spec sheet pages and put them in 3-ring binders. I also put a small laptop with a BIG screen on my soldering/assembly bench for quick look-ups and displaying layouts and schematics.

[barnacle]

Two books I really miss are the TI 74 series 'yellow' book, and the Motorola CMOS 'blue' book. Both an inch thick, both hopelessly out of date, but I still wish I had them around. Mind you, it's depressing how many useful parts died between 74LS days and today

Rule one on any project: grab the datasheets (I like Nexperia for their explanations slightly better than TI) and store them in the project folder. Even if I already have them. Even if they're three thousand pages long - looking at some of the ARM microcontrollers - it's still work keeping them local.

Neil

[Paganini]

Since I started this thread, I did track down a few data books, including the TI yellow book you mention. Mine is from 1984; I'd really like to get the 1989 one (I have a PDF copy of it on my desktop), but it is a bit hard to find it seems. I also got the National / Fairchild one that Garth recommended above. It was expensive, but it has a "NAVAL ECM DEPARTMENT" sticker on it, which is cool. I also got a Signetics one, just because it was cheap and I liked the cover. They're all useful, but the TI one is the only one that has ALL the ICs I'm using (`377, `590, and so on). It is really nice to be able to have one or the other of them open on the desk right in front of me while I'm connecting pins!