3 ms·

Was short on time yesterday. Will elaborate today. It's a little different from the abstractions, which are of course, poor but that's less important. There ar

by wrldos 4y ago

Was short on time yesterday. Will elaborate today. It's a little different from the abstractions, which are of course, poor but that's less important. There are two Mims camps as a rule. Those who bought the books and perhaps read them and didn't build anything and have fond memories. Then there were those of us who actually build stuff out of the books and experienced the hell that is debugging a poor design with no skills or knowledge. My entire early days of electronics were unfortunately constrained by these books. The only reason the books existed was they looked cheap, cute and simple enough for Radio Shack to sell lots of copies and use that to leverage a hobby industry. They were not quality material and in fact were quite frustrating and destructive. Throw on the dubious quality of some of the components on the market back then (fuck you Radio Shack MPF102) and it was a mess. Regarding The Art of Electronics, I was given the first edition of this back in the late 1980s and jumped right in. Whilst light on theory intentionally, the book is actually backed up by a lot of professional experience in the industry. There is a student guide/laboratory manual that goes with it that deals with the applied side of it as well so at a basic level they should be considered together. This book turned everything around and led to an EE career. Roll on a few years from there, I had managed to self teach away most of the nasty, learned algebra at school, jumped into theoretical side via Sedra/Smith. After that everything worked every time. I have a box of 35 year old failures somewhere I will analyse at some point. I did consider opening a YT channel for this but time does not currently allow.

bsder 4y ago
It's funny, because my experience is almost precisely the inverse. I found that "The Art of Electronics" includes a lot of very suboptimal circuits that easily mislead people. There are a lot of "restricted domain" circuits in AoE and very little guidance saying "If you're using this, you probably screwed up." By contrast, I learned and built stuff from the Mims circuits all through high-school. Things worked fine for me. Now, I didn't try to do RF circuits--I was mostly doing lower speed analog with some digital stuff. I don't remember any of it being flaky. In fact, I remember using one of my Mims handbooks to help debug one of my AoE circuits. I hit "The Art of Electronics" in college via my Physics department starting freshman year (I was a mainline EE taking a bunch of Physics classes--don't ask). Putting together experiments using circuits from "The Art of Electronics" was generally a lot of frustration. Of course, like you, once I hit the real "Electronics 101" (a Junior year class), those problems all went away. Suddenly I knew which ones would work for which domains and my frustration mostly went away.

by wrldos 4y ago

bsder 4y ago

It's funny, because my experience is almost precisely the inverse. I found that "The Art of Electronics" includes a lot of very suboptimal circuits that easily mislead people. There are a lot of "restricted domain" circuits in AoE and very little guidance saying "If you're using this, you probably screwed up." By contrast, I learned and built stuff from the Mims circuits all through high-school. Things worked fine for me. Now, I didn't try to do RF circuits--I was mostly doing lower speed analog with some digital stuff. I don't remember any of it being flaky. In fact, I remember using one of my Mims handbooks to help debug one of my AoE circuits. I hit "The Art of Electronics" in college via my Physics department starting freshman year (I was a mainline EE taking a bunch of Physics classes--don't ask). Putting together experiments using circuits from "The Art of Electronics" was generally a lot of frustration. Of course, like you, once I hit the real "Electronics 101" (a Junior year class), those problems all went away. Suddenly I knew which ones would work for which domains and my frustration mostly went away.