I almost flunked 4th grade. The suggestion was made that I need to pick a book to read in the library, ANY book at all.... and that's when I found The Boy's second book of Electronics[2] and learned the wonders of the CK722.
It was at that point I started taking things apart to see how they worked. In 6th grade I built a circuit (in free space, I didn't know about perf board, etc) with an IC from radio shack, that picked up my local radio station (by accident)
I took it to school to show the teacher, but it didn't work there. (The building probably shielded out the RF)
It was soon after that that I started really fixing things and getting into Ham Radio, etc. I've been KA9DGX since 1979 if I recall correctly.
My EE lecturer described Forrest Mims as the single largest source of brain damage in the EE community. Unlearning the abstractions in those books was a common source of problems apparently.
Ergo I'm glad I steered around them. My favourite author on such matters is Wes Hayward, particularly Experimental Methods in RF Design which taught me more about electronics than any other book out there.
My experience with Forrest Mims were primarily with his Engineer's Mini Notebooks that Radio Shack published. I don't actual remember much if any in the way of electronic theory/abstractions in those notebooks. I know he had a column for Popular Electronics but these also primarily detailed hobbyist projects.
I think there might be two kinds of electronics enthusiasts: the hobbyist and the EE major. For those like myself where electronics is a hobby, Forrest was something of a hero.
I have heard that (rightfully!) said about "Art of Electronics" but this is the first time I have seen Mims mentioned similarly.
The biggest problem I have with everybody is being taught "electrons are flowing". I understand that teachers don't want to go down the rabbit hole of "waves are transmitting the power" but it would sure help if teachers would at least mention that electrons flowing is a "good enough" analogy and not physical reality.
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.
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.
My undergrad prof didn't call out moms specifically, but was very negative towards any sort of mention of hobby/amateur electronics. For him, it was specifically because he thought that the only way to learn the basics was to have the calc & physics underpinning first before even knowing what the components actually do. This was in reference to overhearing a classmate explaining to someone why anyone would care about a capacitor. It was typical undergrad physics material discussing the mathematics behind a capacitor, and this person was mentioning some of the real-world uses like filtering. I clearly remember the prof saying "oh, you're one of those hobbyists" followed by something to the effect of that we were there to learn, not play around.
Basically, just an elitist attitude that the proper way to learn about electronics is to start with the math, and anything else wasn't proper engineering. Which is sad, b/c from what I remember Forrest Mims' books are actually some of the best intro electronics info available, since he doesn't gloss over the complexity but still writes in a way that doesn't require 2 semesters of calculus to understand.
> I clearly remember the prof saying "oh, you're one of those hobbyists"
I have a very different, and more pleasant, memory of walking into a 3rd-year Electromagnetic Fields class that had some stuff on the board leftover from a senior-year "Microwaves and Radar" class. Prof said, "half a point on the midterm to anyone who knows what that diagram is." I glanced up, said, "Smith chart" and went back to getting my assignment out. He stared at me in surprise and said "Oh, we have a ham in the room!"
Don't remember if I ever got my 0.5 point increase though. I do remember barely passing that class!
Same. I suspect the prof wanted students to think of components as their mathematical models, not using any analogical sense. You can only do that when you have the mathematics to do so.
My high school electronics teacher stayed in his office muttering "I know enough mathematics to be an engineer." ... while we dry-lab'd all our circuits at our benches.
When I was a teenager I got https://www.amazon.com/Basic-electronics-theory-projects-exp... which was great. In my 20s, I kept checking out "The Art of Electronics" which was fantastic, and I seemed to be the only one who ever checked the book out of my local library.
Similar story here. In my hometown the library there had a great collection of technical books in general but electronics in particular, that was better than the books my Uni had, which was in a town 20 times more populous and a center of development. And yeah, on the rooster for those books only my name was there as I kept checked them out multiple times during my high school and later as a student at Uni.
I have to ask, owning both Don Lancaster’s TTL Cookbook and Walt Jung’s IC Op-amp cookbook, how many of the devices described in those books are available today? Does it make sense to think about 74xx series devices (I guess the 555 timer is still around). 1970’s opamp packages? Are DIP packages still available. Can I wire wrap?
I'm pretty sure Don's still alive and since he welcomes contact, you can call him :-) He's a nice fellow to talk to.
A surprising number of those devices are still around, but some may command premium prices since their only use is for legacy replacements. No one in 2023 should be using a 741 op-amp, but you can still buy them. I actually used a 74LS245 in a new project last summer as a 3.3 - 5V level converter because actual level converter chips were Unobtainium!
DIP packages are still around, but tend to cost more than SMT probably because of economies of scale and physical size.
You can wire wrap!!! Now there's a technology from the past :-) I recently bought wire wrap wire (makes good protoboard connections) but it's been a long time since I saw a wire-wrap socket outside one of my parts drawers. Surplus suppliers like MPJA, BG Micro and Jameco probably still have lots of them. Don't know where you're going to find a wire wrap tool tho.
Heh, a 741 op-amp was my very first guitar amp. I used that while I saved up to get a real amp. I had some janky circuit I made up using a 9v battery, a few resistors and a little speaker and some scant knowledge from my EE 214 class. Got some sick distortion out of that thing. But I think my circuit drew too much current because the op-amps would only last a week or two before burning out (and ran quite hot), but they were cheap to replace. Details are a bit sketchy because this would have been in 1991.
In my experience wirewrapping boards, never use the hand wrappers. They don't wrap tight enough, and after a year or so you'll be bedeviled by random glitches. Don't get a battery one.
Get a plug in one. They wrap nice and tight enough to cold weld the wire to the pin. Besides, they're a joy to use. BZZT! and they're done.
As I have said elsewhere on HN, I can count on a small number of hands how many times I delt with someone who knew how to wirewrap and had decent tools wrapping a bad joint. That stuff went to space, and war, after all. Oh, sure...after 30-40 years those DEC Unibus backplane wraps sometimes got a little flaky depending on mechanical stress (as my VAX attests), but I think we can forgive that. It was the novices with a pencil wrapper and a couple of dozen wraps under their belt that gave it a bad rep.
TAB books were virtually all garbage and apparently sold by the pound. I remember the (one of?) 6809 books had typos/mistakes in many of the source listings and schematics that even a novice could tell had issues. I had a friend spend a high school semester trying to get a Z80 thing running from a TAB book and finally had an electrical engineer friend of his dad look at the book and say "whoever wrote this doesn't know much about electronics...they apparently think TTL is the same as Legos".
But on the up side...they were hardback and you got a pile of them for dirt.
I always liked "RF Circuit Design" by Christopher Bowick. I just noticed that after 25 years a 2nd edition was released in 2008, but I don't know how it compares to the first edition.
I've just spent a few days learning all about Smith Charts and matching. I've got a NanoVNA and my friend has a long wire that won't tune on 80 meters. It turns out that the extra 20 feet of coax that he added to move the tuner near the radio makes it impossible to match, because of the transformation of the load.
It was frustrating, but I really learned quite a bit. Today I spent trying to understand exactly how a NanoVNA works internally. If I knew C better (or, actually, wasn't afraid of it), I'd dig into the source code. The circuit is pretty easy to grok.
This triggered a memory from my childhood of finding Basic programming books published by Tab in the musty corners of my town's public library. Back when both computers and books seemed to be full of mystery and wonder.
I still have a TAB book called "Writing BASIC Adventure Programs for the TRS-80" by Frank Dacosta that I bought for $10 in 1985 or so. The code in there is kind of a nightmare, but at the time, I was just a kid, soaking it up.
It was at that point I started taking things apart to see how they worked. In 6th grade I built a circuit (in free space, I didn't know about perf board, etc) with an IC from radio shack, that picked up my local radio station (by accident)
I took it to school to show the teacher, but it didn't work there. (The building probably shielded out the RF)
It was soon after that that I started really fixing things and getting into Ham Radio, etc. I've been KA9DGX since 1979 if I recall correctly.
[2] https://worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Technology/The-B...