From an accessible history of design to a facsimile of a super rare architecture magazine, these are the books we loved this year.

In the first of a multi-part series on how to design a custom chip for under $1,000, our Analog Editor gets you started with a Magnificent 7 list of textbooks. TinyTapeout offers a course that ...

166 pp., $29.95 (paper), ISBN 0-201-70851-5. With few exceptions (and this is not one of them) in computing, the word, "simple" should only be applied with some form of a "relative-to" qualification.