Ultimate Electronics
I don’t want to be a jerk with this comment.. this looks like a great resource, and it obviously represents a lot of work by a lot of talented people. But the premise seems to be the same premise that kept me away from a fun and practical hobby for decades.<p>I got a Radio Shack 50-in-1 electronics kit for Christmas when I was a little kit. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, but when I tried to go further with my interest, all I got was equations and theory. For years I just wanted to understand how a transistor, with only 3 connections, could be like a relay, which had two pairs of connections and made logical sense to me. Keep in mind this was pre-Internet, so resources were somewhat limited. In any case, I eventually gave up on hardware and focused my attention on programming.<p>It wasn’t until the advent of the Arduino that the spark was rekindled and I found a new on ramp to electronics. Start with a breadboard and cookie-cutter circuits that you don’t really have to understand at first, and control everything with software, because you know software. Gradually phrases like “current-limiting resistor” and “bias voltage” start making sense. Watch people like Dave Jones and Big Clive take things apart on YouTube and reverse engineer them. The circuits get bigger and more complex. The next project needs an op-amp, and to your surprise, you can understand the theory now. The data sheet parameters make sense. You can pick out which 4 of the 5 answers on the electronics Stack Exchange are wrong, and adapt the right one to your needs.<p>I’m having a lot of fun making things, and to answer the question in the book’s introduction, “have you considered how electron collisions lead to Ohm’s Law‘s linearity”, the answer is a resounding “no”. And if people hadn’t told me I needed to consider that to play with electronics, I might not have missed out on many more years of fun.