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Make: Electronics Book Bundle
- asimuvPR 10y agoNice bundle. Wish each book linked to a list of components required to complete the activities.
- vonnik 10y agomissing a 't' in electronics
- StavrosK 10y agoIs this worth it? I'm not familiar with the series, but I love hardware hacking at a novice level.
- msie 10y agoIt's a very good deal!
- msie 10y ago3 encyclopedias + both make:electronics books are a steal for $15!!!
- daveguy 10y agoDefinitely worth it. I have a physical copy of Make: Electronics and that book alone is worth the "fully unlocked" price of $16 or so. -- especially if you are a software person and want to dabble in diy hardware.
- sqldba 10y agoI wanted to try my hand at this but you need components to follow their book and their kits run out of stock for months at a time (and most years are out of stock indefinitely except for a few seconds before they get snapped up). Buying all the components yourself separately would be a nightmare if not impossible
- rashkov 10y agoThe author actually has put up a site that links to the kits. I just bought it and am about half way through the book. It's great! The kit I got is from Chaney electronics. It is linked to from the site [1]. There's a more expensive kit from Makershed. The ones on Amazon are for the first edition of the book so don't get it there. Get it on Makershed's site. Again though it's more expensive by half. [1] http://plattkits.com http://plattkits.com
- etatoby 10y agoI bought Make: Electronics in paper format and have had absolutely no trouble acquiring all the components separately. The trick is to order from $0.99 Chinese eBay sellers and have patience to wait a few months for all the mail to arrive. If you get something in bad shape, such as bent IC pins (or never get it, although that's quite rare) do NOT give negative feedback, instead contact the seller and they will gladly post another packet your way, so that they can get good feedback. Of course, if you are in a hurry, there are lots of component shops that will sell you the same things for 10x the price and deliver them in a few days.
- zellyn 10y agoI bought one of the old, accidentally incorrect kits that sell for much less, and then brought it up to parity by buying individual components.
- ageofwant 10y agoWhere I live 15$US buys you 4 12 Oz (Large) flat whites - that would be 'latte's' for Americans, I think. So its probably worth it. I own (sorry, licensed user) of a few of the books in the bundle and they are good introduction material generally. You will get your $15's value out of them I'm sure.
- coredog64 10y agoStarbucks sells flat whites, bringing culture to those Americans who have never visited Australia or New Zealand.
- contingencies 10y agoNot in China! Here we mug a cino, homes. Smacks of LA.
- StavrosK 10y agoAlas, where I live, $25 is a day's wages.
- johnhattan 10y agoFYI, the "Making Things Talk" book is not about attaching voice circuitry to devices. It's about making devices that can communicate with each other.
- criddell 10y agoI'm very tempted to buy this, but I know it would just be another hobby that I don't have time for. Even if I could afford to be retired, I doubt I would have enough time to explore all the things that interest me.
- mjfl 10y agoYup... I have "The Art of Electronics" megatome sitting right next to this keyboard I'm typing on. Will I have time to open it up this month? Maybe to wistfully flip through it, right before I go to bed. Otherwise, probably not.
- lstamour 10y agoThat book -- I tried reading it. It's ... well, hard to stay focused. Ended up just now getting "Learning the Art of Electronics: A Hands-On Lab Course," its student manual companion, in the hopes that I'll be able to follow both easier than just one alone. :)
- grandalf 10y agome too!
- tjl 10y agoI have an earlier edition of "The Art of Electronics" and I'm wondering how different the latest edition is. That said, I rarely open it so it probably doesn't really matter anyway. I've done only one electronics project since my electronics course in undergrad. I keep meaning to do more, but I never get around to it.
- Kliment 10y agoI bought the new one on the basis of the sample chapter that is available to download at any number of places. It's a much much better book in terms of readability and structure, and has a lot of additional content compared to the previous edition. A lot has happened in electronics since 1989. I recommend you go read the sample chapter and decide accordingly.
- alister 10y agoCan someone who has actually bought this tell us whether this is as good as the print versions? Things like all the diagrams and photos being present, having good resolution, etc. I've heard so many horror stories about how great technical books get mangled when they're made into ebook versions (frankly I'd be quite happy with a proper PDF version).
- johnhattan 10y agoI bought one of the previous Make Magazine bundles, and the PDF's were very high quality. Definitely recommended over the ebook versions, as there's a lot of formatting.
- pawadu 10y agoI buy all their bundles. The PDF quality is usually good but that could also mean that the files are too big to be read on a tablet or a phone. The mobi & epub versions are sometimes just a dump of the PDF file. Speaking of quality, their Android bundles are unfortunately pure garbage. They used to be great but now they are just garbage. If someone from the humblebundle team is reading this: what the hell is going on there?
- interurban 10y agoI bought the last couple of Make bundles and they come with a couple of ebook formats plus PDFs, with HQ PDFs for some titles. I definitely recommend the PDFs, but it's nice to have options.
- grandalf 10y agoin some cases, my kindle is far more readable with a properly produce mobi file -- full margins, etc.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoAs far as I know, all of the Humble Bundles offer PDF, MOBI, and EPUB format. (DRM-free, of course.) The PDFs are all fully-formatted pages, the way the publisher intended. One of the reasons I buy these. PDFs rock.
- foogered 10y agoFYI: You need a Kinect for the Making Things See book.
- dan1234 10y agoAnd, if you're picking up one on eBay (approx £15), be sure to get the standalone version which comes with an external power supply.
- probably_wrong 10y agoSlightly off-topic. I've tried to do some basic circuits, but I always strike the same issue: resistors. Most basic books just say "add this resistor here", meaning that whenever I've tried to make changes I either kill my circuits or don't give them enough power (you can have hours of fun debugging electronics when you have a dead circuit and you don't know it). Is there a simple equation I'm missing somewhere? And perhaps more related, is this issue covered in one of these books?
- StavrosK 10y agoThere is a simple equation, Ohm's law. Resistors are usually there to drop voltage, but there isn't enough detail in the problem you're facing to know exactly what the answer should be. I'm not very proficient in hardware, so I'm about as confused as you, but clarifying your question can help. I bought these books (not the plus bundle, though) and they explain things a lot, so there is a very nice explanation for what resistors do in them, and hopefully why they're used where they're used. I mean, for $2 or so, there's no question about it.
- ethbro 10y agoOhm's law is a important starting point (and will explain a lot of the basics if you branch off from there search terms you don't know). However, I think the biggest problem for why resistors / capacitors / inductors / transformers are confusing for people coming from a software background is that they tend to (a) have to do with power circuitry, (b) be backed by physics that are non-digital, & (c) be fundamentally parallel/functional in nature. So a lot of intuition we have about digital state wrt imperative languages makes analog power circuitry design / function seem bizarre. If you're really curious, I'd try and find an introductory text to basic power circuitry design (good starting point: how to build a passive & active AC/DC transformer). Most of the components get used in that context and if you can understand them there then you can understand them anywhere.
- StavrosK 10y agoRelatedly, I skimmed one of the Make books (the encyclopedia of parts, part 1), and it goes into some detail about how a transformer works, so that seems like a good starting point (for me as well), thanks.
- orbitingpluto 10y agoIt looks like almost everything in this bundle is available on O'Reilly Safari. Still worth it.
- alister 10y agoTheir individual membership is $399/year[1] for "unlimited" books and videos, but there's no obvious place on their website where they actually list the books available -- very annoying. I suppose their target audience is a manager at a large enterprise who's buying a subscription as a perk for his employees; he doesn't really care about a precise list of books so long as he knows that it's big. [1] https://www.safaribooksonline.com/pricing/ https://www.safaribooksonline.com/pricing/
- orbitingpluto 10y agoYou can search from the main page and get a list of Maker Media electronics books: https://ssearch.oreilly.com/?all=2;i=1;q=electronics;q1=Books;q2=Maker+Media+Inc;x1=t1;x2=publisher&act=pg_viewall https://ssearch.oreilly.com/?all=2;i=1;q=electronics;q1=Book...