(no subject)
Edited from an email to a friend who is in the late stages of testing a moderately big, fairly featureful robot he built in a year of 40+ hour weeks (on top of his 40-hour/week day job) in which he taught himself electronics and machining to boot. A brain dump on hobby magazines and trade rags:
Trade rags:
It's a bit unethical for me to encourage the general public to go sign up for free trade rags. So I will not. I will note that if you are serious about electronics, you owe it to yourself to read the design sections of Electronic Design and EDN. You can find those sections online at the following links, and you won't clutter up your place with old magazines:
http://www.elecdesign.com/Departments/DepartmentID/2/2.html
http://edn.com/index.asp?layout=news&spacedesc=designIdeas
EDN's Design Ideas section is the gold standard.
Electronic Design, on the other hand, has Bob Pease's column:
http://www.national.com/rap/
http://www.elecdesign.com/Departments/DepartmentID/6/6.html
The design sections in the back of these combined, and combined with Bob Pease's column, are better than anything out there oriented to hobbyists, though Electronics World comes close. And they're free. In trade-show season they come twice a month, too.
I find EE Times entertaining but it is more a pure PR organ. Good for business news. For that, though, siliconvalley.com, the online version of the San Jose Mercury News' business section, is better. I read it every day.
I periodically apply for a free subscription to Embedded Design but I haven't received a magazine yet, so I read Jack Gannsle's columns on-line. Overrated (which Bob Pease is not)---anyone who thinks of him as guru is suspect in my book--but usually interesting---and occasionally enlightening at the duh-why-didn't-I-realize-that-before level.
http://www.embedded.com/columns/ep/
http://www.embedded.com/columns/bp/
Hobby magazines:
Nuts and Volts is fun I guess. I pick it up when there's an interesting article. They have a robot magazine too I look at sometimes. The last US general-readership electronics hobbyist magazine left.
Circuit Cellar is better technically but is dominated by the sort of microcontroller guy who is somewhat scared of op amps [WARNING: PDF, large], and wishes the Z-80 would come back. So it's a lot of cookie-cutter embedded stuff. The mathematical and software and analog sophistication is honestly not that much better than N&V, but the presentation is so much better that it took me a while to figure this out. The absolute best writing in any electronics magazine ever, which I attribute to its legacy of the editorial polish of BYTE magazine.
Both, like most American magazines, basically publish the same articles over and over. If you have two or three year's run of them, you know what's coming up in the next year or so. It is kind of like the cycle of readings in the Catholic Church.
Amateur radio: QST was getting a lot better before I let my membership lapse. It's not on newsstands any more. You have to join the ARRL. Even better, if you are serious about RF, is their QEX, which pretends to the standards of a professional journal. Nice, but I probably won't be building anything from it. Occasionally CQ deviates from its contesting, contesting, and things-to-buy format to publish a project or two that is more interesting than say, how to solder a cable for a particular brand of radio. So I sometimes pick it up. I miss 73 even though its technical content was generally atrocious. I used to just get a kick out of Wayne Green's editorial style. It was sort of like a radio magazine edited by Art Bell, if you can imagine such a thing. I get a couple trade rags for RF designers too. They're neato.
audioXpress is loads of fun if you like stereos. It is the only magazine published in the US today that really reminds me of the technical style of electronics magazines from before BYTE stopped publishing schematics. Technically about at the level of Circuit Cellar but a bit more free-wheeling since hi-fi people tend to be superstitious AND biased towards experimentalism/empiricism. Nothing else you might find on a newsstand publishes audio circuits of any complexity.
UK/European magazines, particularly the ones that get imported to the US, tend to have very slightly better technical content than US ones. Historically, they have tended to rely on European semiconductors and other parts that can be scarce or expensive in the US, so they are really better for ideas than for connect-the-dots projects.
Electronics World is the greatest. Their website is very much down for reconstruction, so no link. It is quirkily British and will merrily publish crazy physics by EEs who don't believe in relativity.
It also publishes things you won't find anywhere else, like a serious multiple-article technical rundown by an obsessive audio guy on capacitor distortion a few years back. I keep meaning to order the CD with all his articles and data.
Despite the quirkiness, its technical level is pretty professional, about on par with design sections of US trade rags, or the better stuff in Circuit Cellar or audioXpress. Not quite as good as the better stuff in QEX. Tends towards British engineering values, which usually involve at least two of crazy complicated spaghetti-code-style approaches, exotic materials, or painfully difficult maintenance. These being unavoidably necessary to actualize theoretically heartbreakingly elegant designs that were absolute works of genius on paper. It used to be "Wireless World" and despite the shift to a more general focus it's the closest thing left to what amateur radio magazines used to be like before the demise of Ham Radio magazine. (QST + QEX is not such a bad substitute either, but QST alone sticks to real basics).
Another UK magazine that is kind of like Nuts and Volts is Everyday Practical Electronics. It is not too bad or anything, but I never buy it because I won't pay extra for not too bad. It is slipped-through-the-nets proof of the "survivor bias" involved in thinking that European stuff is better.
When I see it, and there's a good article, I pick up Elektor Electronics. This combination means I have two copies of the English edition and a pile of the German ones from when I was a kid. It's a pan-European magazine that's edited in the Netherlands, primarily targeted to the German market, and published in a number of languages, including English. It was better in German in the eighties, but, you know, what wasn't? It's a little bit more at the cookie-cutter level like Circuit Cellar but just like Circuit Cellar it occasionally publishes a great hack or an impressively thorough design in that particularly stolid German style. They pride themselves on being the first to publish cool projects. You'll see editorial comments to the effect that their pride was wounded by being scooped by Circuit Cellar on a particular microcontroller application but, of course, their design is better. Circuit Cellar, of course, completely ignores them. The articles in the issues I have are very crudely translated from German: I don't know if any of the English edition's editors speak English as a native language. Either that or those that do are too busy to rework the translations much.