With a big risk of thread drift…
This was the programming book ‘bible’ I had at Uni … compared to some current publications it’s concise and to the point and was the gateway into unix, C,C+ programming.
Anyone starting out in programming I really recommend it, as you learn to programme whilst being mindful of the machine resources and basic architecture.
Dennis Ritchie invented the C programming language in case anyone doesn’t know.
Oh my… I also had that one. Compact, and used it as reference book 
Which was rapidly followed by that one.
At that time I used to spend too much time staring at my monitors…
Fortunately, this all behind me 
I was lost at transistor, possibily even earlier…
True class B is where at least two transistors work together in a ‘push pull’ manner, one amplifying the positive and the other the negative part of the signal. However a transistor doesn’t switch on in a linear way so distortion is introduced as the signal goes from negative to positive or vica versa. As such class B is only used in specific applications where high levels of distortion are not important, but efficiency is. FM RF power amplifier stages are a good example, where all the distortion harmonics are filtered away using powerful RF filtering, and the quality of the modulating signal is derived from the change of the carrier frequency, and not the shape or quality of the carrier itself.
Audio amplifiers are very different would sound very poor indeed using class B, so class AB is often used… Naim use class AB in their output stages in their amps.
This is where the positive and negative output stage transistors are always turned on and biased into their linear or low distortion mode even with no signal… this is the ‘A’ bit. The downside is that there is inefficiency as the transistor is on amplifying even if no signal, but distortion can be made very low.
Ah, my younger days as a C programmer and my first “Hello World” 
Where did the Class B myth start or come from then? Do you know???
I am not sure a myth… I think it might just be a simplification of class AB. At 30,000 feet they look similar…
Knuth’s aphorism:
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
Applies to electronics as well as (most particularly) to computing.
(Actually Knuth attributed it to one of his colleagues not himself.)
Also the new generation of Germanio…now is very possible make this more eficient.
perdon by my English,only speaker spanish.
Hi I am not sure weather it is relevant but Gamut amplifiers use huge transistors…and avoid the npn/pnp scenario does anybody know what class of amp they are…
Well all bipolar transistors are either npn or pnp… so you can’t avoid that, or you would not be using bipolar tansistors
matched pair pnp/npn running at the same temperature and the same dissipation/heatsink
I seem to recall they are class A/B, but with quite a strong bias into ckass A so that at lower volumes woukd be class A.
On 29 March 1998 03:55 AM, Julian Vereker said: “All Naim power amps are class B and they have as low a bias as we can manage, just a few milliamps.”
He gave two reasons for this: “to make a good push/pull power amp, the two halves need to match very closely since there is only one common feedback loop—this applies whatever the ‘class’ of the amp. If one achieves this degree of precision then one only needs a very small bias current.”
"Also it is extremely wasteful of resources making class A power amps, since they use large amounts of electricity even when they are not playing music, [and] this means the waste heat has to be dissipated into the atmosphere without overheating the components and thus shortening their lives, which implies large heatsinks, big heavy and expensive in terms of resources pieces of equipment.
Just punting round the web
Not that it matters, but they are class AB. Class B amplifiers are characterised by highbdistortion high efficiency Push pull … definitely not what you use for audio amplifiers.
Class AB is where the push pull transistors are biased into their linearity transfer function zone to eliminate the dead zone, for low distortion, but at a cost of efficiency.
I suspect in consumer land class AB gets simplified to class B, but for an electronics engineer they are rather different.
Distortion from a class B amp
Class AB with bias, one half of output shown
This describes my marriage quite nicely.
Push-Pull describes mine…
ooh err missus
Nice graphic explanation, cheers.
You are welcome, thank you
