6 ms·

These aren't great to be honest. I've scanned through them in the past and there's a ton of missing stuff. You can read these and know what stuff is and how it

These aren't great to be honest. I've scanned through them in the past and there's a ton of missing stuff. You can read these and know what stuff is and how it works but not how to use it or any practical concerns. This is just a collection of facts. Would recommend The Art of Electronics (just grab the 2nd edition and the student manual - it's fine) or Practical Electronics for Inventors. Also stay away from Mimms books[1] and Make stuff. They're mostly glossy crap that doesn't actually have any content and are chock full of mistakes. If you want to wire shit to an arduino, don't buy a book, just google it. [1] Yes I know this is controversial but I started there and had to unlearn it all. It's a bad foundation.

invisible_dust 11y ago
After a time in the military myself, I find military resources to be somewhat suspect in terms of quality and accuracy.
- wumbernang 11y ago
  True. I worked for a military contactor and had to deal with what RAF 'engineers' did to our radio kit. My current main scope, a Tek 453, was ex military and it had some after market repairs done by a monkey with soldering kit. Took me a couple of days to clean it up properly.
k0doque 11y ago
As a budding a student of electronics, I found the mims book to be while not very rigorous to provide a good general overview and intuition on the field, which makes subsequent more "serious" more manageable, could you give more details as to why I should not read it?
- wumbernang 11y ago
  1. Little explanation of how anything actually works which is crucial for intuition. 2. Some of the fundamentals are actually wrong, particularly in Getting Started in Electronics. 3. It deals with basic construction and very basic fundamentals only really. If you want to build a kit, it's fine but if you want to create something, forget it.
  - kw71 11y ago
    I read "Getting Started" over and over from age 7 or so. Nothing else made any sense at that age. It took me a while to digest it but I did figure out enough to do more with the "160 in one electronics board" [1] than the circuits suggested in its book. Despite all the things I left out I am grateful that I had it. If it went on and on about engineering calculations, I would not have had the capacity or patience. I would recommend other books if asked by an adult, but is something better out now for kids? [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=160+in+one+electronics&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=160+in+one+electronics&tbm=i...
    - hansyeakel 11y ago
      Would you mind sharing your recommendations? TAE, Practical Electronics for Inventors, Mims, and Charles Platt's series for Make tend to be the ones that come up most frequently, but I'd be curious to hear if you've found others that are excellent.
      - kw71 11y ago
        TAE of course. I also like Peter Wilson, _The Circuit Designer's Companion_, the 3rd edition is published 2012 by Newnes. It's on libgen if you want to look through it before buying.
        hansyeakel 11y ago
        Thank you, I'll check it out!
  - userbinator 11y ago
    Some of the fundamentals are actually wrong, particularly in Getting Started in Electronics Is there a list of what's wrong somewhere? A quick Google does not reveal anything...
mpyne 11y ago
> These aren't great to be honest. I've scanned through them in the past and there's a ton of missing stuff. You can read these and know what stuff is and how it works but not how to use it or any practical concerns. This is just a collection of facts. Well, they're not meant to get people on the way to understanding James Clerk Maxwell. They're meant to get high schoolers without much (if any) formal science training to the level that they can safely maintain, operate and repair the specific electrical and electronic components used in Navy fleet applications. So yes, everything about how this stuff actually works is simplified, and often even "dumbed down". So I wouldn't use these guides as reference material if I were trying to take college-level versions of these courses as you'd just have to unlearn and re-learn too much to make it useful. But there's a method to the madness here.
- weland 11y ago
  > They're meant to get high schoolers without much (if any) formal science training to the level that they can safely maintain, operate and repair the specific electrical and electronic components used in Navy fleet applications. The key here is "maintain, operate and repair". Army training manuals are generally great for that. They are not a resource to learn design from. If someone's objective is to learn how to make things, they're a very bad place to start.
  - mpyne 11y ago
    OK, but who's arguing otherwise?
  - jebblue 11y ago
    I learned enough to know that a lot of people designing electronics taught by civilian colleges should have gone into the military first and learned how electronics works and what it gets subjected to in the field and how it can fail miserably and how us grease monkeys out there had to come up with often extremely clever, unimaginable fixes for the design goofs made by those civilian graduates who thought of themselves so highly.
    - 11y ago
weland 11y ago
I don't disagree on the quality of these manuals (see my other comment), but for a beginner, The Art of Electronics is a very bad choice. TAE is great if you've gone through university-level courses, understood (or at least was able to reproduce) the math but can't grok transistors without diagrams and formulae and know next to nothing about design principles. For someone with no prior exposure, it's a terrible book. It explains very little about why things are the way they are. Rules of thumb are great when you know what's behind them. When you don't, it's a shaky bridge to walk on.
- wumbernang 11y ago
  Hence why I suggested the student manual which is a little more forgiving. TAoE isn't something you read cover to cover anyway, it's a reference book.
jebblue 11y ago
Actually the quality is superb. It is used to train many fine electronics personnel in the military. The military does not graduate people who do not know how to use what they learned or practical application.

invisible_dust 11y ago

After a time in the military myself, I find military resources to be somewhat suspect in terms of quality and accuracy.

wumbernang 11y ago
True. I worked for a military contactor and had to deal with what RAF 'engineers' did to our radio kit. My current main scope, a Tek 453, was ex military and it had some after market repairs done by a monkey with soldering kit. Took me a couple of days to clean it up properly.

k0doque 11y ago

As a budding a student of electronics, I found the mims book to be while not very rigorous to provide a good general overview and intuition on the field, which makes subsequent more "serious" more manageable, could you give more details as to why I should not read it?

wumbernang 11y ago
1. Little explanation of how anything actually works which is crucial for intuition. 2. Some of the fundamentals are actually wrong, particularly in Getting Started in Electronics. 3. It deals with basic construction and very basic fundamentals only really. If you want to build a kit, it's fine but if you want to create something, forget it.
- kw71 11y ago
  I read "Getting Started" over and over from age 7 or so. Nothing else made any sense at that age. It took me a while to digest it but I did figure out enough to do more with the "160 in one electronics board" [1] than the circuits suggested in its book. Despite all the things I left out I am grateful that I had it. If it went on and on about engineering calculations, I would not have had the capacity or patience. I would recommend other books if asked by an adult, but is something better out now for kids? [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=160+in+one+electronics&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=160+in+one+electronics&tbm=i...
  - hansyeakel 11y ago
    Would you mind sharing your recommendations? TAE, Practical Electronics for Inventors, Mims, and Charles Platt's series for Make tend to be the ones that come up most frequently, but I'd be curious to hear if you've found others that are excellent.
    - kw71 11y ago
      TAE of course. I also like Peter Wilson, _The Circuit Designer's Companion_, the 3rd edition is published 2012 by Newnes. It's on libgen if you want to look through it before buying.
      - hansyeakel 11y ago
        Thank you, I'll check it out!
- userbinator 11y ago
  Some of the fundamentals are actually wrong, particularly in Getting Started in Electronics Is there a list of what's wrong somewhere? A quick Google does not reveal anything...

mpyne 11y ago

> These aren't great to be honest. I've scanned through them in the past and there's a ton of missing stuff. You can read these and know what stuff is and how it works but not how to use it or any practical concerns. This is just a collection of facts. Well, they're not meant to get people on the way to understanding James Clerk Maxwell. They're meant to get high schoolers without much (if any) formal science training to the level that they can safely maintain, operate and repair the specific electrical and electronic components used in Navy fleet applications. So yes, everything about how this stuff actually works is simplified, and often even "dumbed down". So I wouldn't use these guides as reference material if I were trying to take college-level versions of these courses as you'd just have to unlearn and re-learn too much to make it useful. But there's a method to the madness here.

weland 11y ago
> They're meant to get high schoolers without much (if any) formal science training to the level that they can safely maintain, operate and repair the specific electrical and electronic components used in Navy fleet applications. The key here is "maintain, operate and repair". Army training manuals are generally great for that. They are not a resource to learn design from. If someone's objective is to learn how to make things, they're a very bad place to start.
- mpyne 11y ago
  OK, but who's arguing otherwise?
- jebblue 11y ago
  I learned enough to know that a lot of people designing electronics taught by civilian colleges should have gone into the military first and learned how electronics works and what it gets subjected to in the field and how it can fail miserably and how us grease monkeys out there had to come up with often extremely clever, unimaginable fixes for the design goofs made by those civilian graduates who thought of themselves so highly.
  - 11y ago

weland 11y ago

I don't disagree on the quality of these manuals (see my other comment), but for a beginner, The Art of Electronics is a very bad choice. TAE is great if you've gone through university-level courses, understood (or at least was able to reproduce) the math but can't grok transistors without diagrams and formulae and know next to nothing about design principles. For someone with no prior exposure, it's a terrible book. It explains very little about why things are the way they are. Rules of thumb are great when you know what's behind them. When you don't, it's a shaky bridge to walk on.

wumbernang 11y ago
Hence why I suggested the student manual which is a little more forgiving. TAoE isn't something you read cover to cover anyway, it's a reference book.

jebblue 11y ago

Actually the quality is superb. It is used to train many fine electronics personnel in the military. The military does not graduate people who do not know how to use what they learned or practical application.