The Felder & Felder book looks really good and doesn't seem as mathematical as Walecka i.e. more expository. Looking at the ToC/Sample the chapters have a good progression and are nicely setup.
The print copy however seems prohibitively expensive :-(
I did learn German at school but it didn't help much when trying to get to Munich airport last year. I could understand what was going on with the cancelled trains at the station I boarded at, but the train I did catch end up tipping us all out after a few stops.
I could make out a bit of what the driver said, but not enough to be sure of the detail, which is what really mattered. I expected to miss my flight, but just made it in the end.
I wish CPLDs were more well known in the common vernacular.
The industry draws a distinction between CPLDs and FPGAs, and rightly so, but most "Arduino-level" hobbyists think "I want something I can program so that it acts like such-and-such a circuit, I know, I need an FPGA!" when what they probably want is what the professional world would call a CPLD - and the distinction in terminology between the two does more to confuse than to clarify.
I don't know how to fix this; it'd be lovely if the two followed convergent paths, with FPGAs gaining on-board storage and the line between them blurring. Or maybe we need a common term that encompasses both. ("Programmable logic device" is technically that, but no-one knows that.)
You write RTL for them just like you do for FPGAs, you need to configure them as well. The only major benefit is that they don’t have a delay between power up and logic active? But that’s not something that would make a difference for most people.
CPLDs are also a dying breed and being replaced with FPGAs that have parallel on-board flash to allow fast configuration after power up. (e.g. MAX10)
I don’t know anything about this (other than doing mediocre in some undergrad Verilog classes one million years ago). Wikipedia seems to call FPGAs a type of PLD. Of course, everybody has heard of FPGAs; is it right to think they’ve sort of branched off, become their own thing, and eclipsed their superset?
"Programmed like an EEPROM" is part of the problem, any system that needs more than one piece of firmware to be wrangled during the assembly/bringup process is asking for pain.
But, really, no one cares what's inside the box. CPLD or FPGA, they're all about the same. The available PLDs are still not really acceptable. There's a bunch of 5V dinosaurs that the manufacturers would obviously love to axe, and a few tiny little micro-BGA things where you've got to be buying 100k to even submit a documentation bug report. Not much for stuff in the middle.
Tim Hunkin had a wonderful series on TV back in the 80s or 90s - the Secret Life of Machines. Nice relaxed pace and great for kids. The episodes are up on YouTube via his website: https://timhunkin.com/a243_Secret-Life-of-Machines-intro.htm
Stupid me, I assumed there was a tiny clock driving the mechanism that was just geared up to trigger the bigger machinery. That instead looked like a regular clock scaled up to Big Ben size.
Also - those guys are insane. The "safety harness" was a wooden plank chair with some ropes dangling you over the abyss.
That was a TV presentor from a children's programme called Blue Peter.
If you think that looks dicey, search for the video of when another Blue Peter presenter,John Noakes, cleaned Nelsons Column in Trafalgar Square. Note the overhanging wooden ladder and the entire safety equipment was a pair of flared jeans and platform boots!
He also climbed the mast of HMS Ganges which is possibly even more heart stopping.
It's the camera crew that gets me. Peter Duncan has a bucket hanging down to lower his CoG, whereas the cameraman has a hefty shoulder mount making his balance more precarious.
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