Forrest Mims' mini-notebooks were horrible. They consisted of circuits cribbed from app notes -- but with the explanatory text removed. There's no way to unders

Forrest Mims' mini-notebooks were horrible. They consisted of circuits cribbed from app notes -- but with the explanatory text removed. There's no way to understand how circuits work by reading the mini-notebooks. They were specifically designed to keep readers ignorant so they would have to buy more of the lousy books. I plodded through the 555 timer book when I was a kid and didn't learn a single thing. If only I had known about databooks at the time, I could have called Signetics and they would have sent me a free copy of a book with all the same circuits and detailed theory of operations. I might have become an electrical engineer instead of a programmer. I believe Mims was also the author of the awful manual for Rat Shack's 100-in-one kit, which told the lie that a bipolar junction transistor is two diodes back-to-back. This is only true in the literal sense that a transistor has two P-N junctions; it's like if you roll down your car window and ask a passer-by for directions, and he helpfully tells you that you're in your car. It omits the key feature of the transistor, namely transconductance. And after reading it, I couldn't understand transistors for decades. Eventually I got hold of a college-level textbook which explained that when the base-emitter junction is forward-biased, the collector-emitter path acts like a resistor. Simple and clear, unlike Mims' writing which is designed to obfuscate and confound.