I am afraid I am going to be showing my age by asking this question :-)

I have spent the past 25 years mostly writing code - tho' my original intent
was to be an EE!

I have been trying to get more involved in the hardware side of things
again. One thing that has bugged me lately: when I look at digital circuits
I am rather befuddled the alphabet soup that now falls between the 74 at the
beginning and the NNN at the end. My junkbox is mostly full of 74NN and
74LSNN with a little 40NN, 74HCNNN and 74HCTNNN. (Yes, I have plenty of gray
here (but at least I have plenty of hair) :-)

So:

1: where can I get a brief synopsis of the various logic families now
available.

2: what family/families are best for general purpose digital design -
especially around a PIC (this is the PICLIST!).

TIA

Bob Ammerman
RAm Systems
(high performance, high function, low level software)
[and trying to get back into the hardware business a bit!]