When I was a teen, I applied to be an ATT lineman. At that time at least, they sent you a giant study guide that has everything one might want to know about electricity. I was actually blown away by the material.
I've since lost it, but wonder if it exists on the Internet somewhere. My cursory search didn't return anything.
This page lists several ATT publications and has a link to a 1953 publication that could fit your description (and could have been a subsequent editini).
Otherwise, maybe you'd recognize the name as one of the other publications?
Nice! I browsed through the 1953 edition quickly, and it's very similar. So probably some updated version of that.
I was just blown away they send you all that material for free by simply applying. This would have been before the internet was big, so probably isn't as exciting now.
Internet Archive has a 1961 edition, and it's mirrored on 4nn4's Archive.
https://archive.org/details/principlesofelec0000unse_a3j0
(AA can be searched using an archive.org file slug, e.g. "principles...a3j0", or obviously by using the title)
> I was just blown away they send you all that material for free by simply applying.
It was a hangover from their days a quasi-socialist, monopolistic enterprise ("We're the Phone Company"), when they could afford to be "inefficient" in that way -- scare quotes because it's difficult to calculate the cost of preparation and dissemination against all the high-value careers the material may have inspired. These days, an accountant would glance at the cost and cut it out without thinking twice.
It is exciting! I used to read the Ma-Bell manuals in the science and math library at the University of Oregon.
Edited for emphasis.
I found Moritz Klein's videos very interesting to help me understand practical aspects of circuit design as related to analog synthesizers:
I haven't watched any of the lectures, but there's also Georgia Tech's Analog Circuits for Music Synthesis https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOunECWxELQS5bMdWo9Vh...
Any recommendation for open source software or website where one can learn about electricity in an interactive or gamified way?
I can also highly recommend "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill.
That's an awful recommendation for an entry level electronics.
I learned from the 1st edition, in 1984. It's worth noting that the book was actually written for scientists rather than engineers. I was a math and physics major. By a long standing tradition, an electronics course is a standard part of the undergrad physics curriculum.
My dad had "Electronics for Scientists" by Malmstadt et al., 1962. His employer put a bunch of scientists through an electronics course.
The contrast was pretty remarkable. It's all about vacuum tubes, with some introduction of transistors. The 1st edition of AoE had a reasonable amount of material on digital circuits for back then, but I imagine a similar contrast between 1984 and today.
The span of 40+ years has certainly changed how I do electronics.
After The Cat passed, I found a book under her bed entitled "Electronics for Cats". I wonder what she had been plotting.
i don't recommend this book at all. I know nothing about electronics. Think blank slate and this book went straight over my head. I caught it from the comments of one such post on HN
Try pairing it with the companion "Learning the Art of Electronics." It's a hands-on lab workbook that complements the main book. It's very practical.
Or better yet, the "Learning the Learning the Art of Electronics" which breaks down the companion book.
AoE is not meant for people who are starting from zero. Pair it with some other "popular electronics" kind of books and it will start making better sense. One recommendation is Practical Electronics for Inventors by Paul Scherz and Simon Monk. For theory see Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits by Anant Agarwal and Jeffrey Lang.
while this book is simpler, i am still struggling with a lot of stuff, here page 6 https://imgur.com/a/83FQnAx What graph did they plot to derive delta Q / delta T I can tell that on the y axis they had time but I would have loved to see a representation of what the curve on the x axis would look like. A wire is uniform only in theory, in reality its area would keep fluctuating at every mm by very small amounts. Does this equation actually take the effect of this fluctuation. What does A1 and A2 look like, I am assuming A2- A1 = delta Q right? There needs to be an even more grounded book in electronics, something that you can show to a guy who literally has no idea about electronics in the slightest bit and by the end of the book, the guy is a master at it
This is basic Mathematics from introductory Differential Calculus. Refresh your memory from any Calculus book; if you don't know Calculus at all read Calculus: Basic Concepts for High Schools by Tarasov which you can get here - https://mirtitles.org/2018/09/04/calculus-basic-concepts-for...
Your picture is simple enough; but you have mixed up dq (this is the dependent function on the Y-axis) and dt (this is the independent variable on the X-axis) infinitesimals. Their ratio is simply the instantaneous rate of change of electric charge w.r.t. time which is what is the instantaneous electric current. As to the cross-sectional area of a wire varying over its length and how it affects current through it, you can neglect it for short wires and using a specific wire gauge for all normal electronics.
> There needs to be an even more grounded book in electronics, something that you can show to a guy who literally has no idea about electronics in the slightest bit and by the end of the book, the guy is a master at it
Electronics = Physics+Mathematics+Logical Thinking and there can be no shortcuts to its study. You have to put in some effort to study the subject. However things have been simplified and modularized to such a great extent nowadays that you can learn and do a great deal without understanding much of the mathematics and physics involved. The submitted book link in this post is a good basic one to start from.
I found it impenetrable.
I already knew something by the time I read it so that must have helped. I guess you do need a certain maturity level (in the subject) to get started but once you have it (maybe from somewhere else) I think it's great.
It reminds me of my first time trying to learn assembly language when I was in my early teens. I just could not make any sense of it. I knew a little bit of PASCAL and BASIC at the time and that was just alien territory. When I came back a few years later after some exposure then it all came together.
Try going back to the book ;)
If you began with Forth, assembly wouldn't be that odd.
Horowitz and Hill is the canonical recommendation for novices, and a text that almost no novice actually learns from.
Like the dragon book for compilers.
That is like recommending a Knuth book for somebody wanting to learn Python.
'electronics fundamentals' is equivalent to 'python'?
Surely this is like recommending a Knuth book (TAoCP?) to someone wanting to learn 'CS fundamentals', which.. sure?
I see you, metaphor master...
? If you think it's an arbitrary choice then I'm not sure what your point was in the first place.
That's what I learned from!
Is the top link just an advertisement for a book to be bought or is it something I'm missing with the link? There are countless of books and website with that kind of content, but Google is good enough to find them...
I don't know, it's hard for me to know what the author means by "fundamentals". I looked at the table of contents from the amazon website, and somethings that I consider pretty fundamental like Thevenin's Theorem didn't seem to be listed there. By comparison it's in Chapter 1, page 9 on my copy of "The Art of Electronics". I'm not trying to knock the book, it could be very handy, but I would use the term "basics" as opposed to "fundamentals" to describe the content as I understand it.
I really liked Practical Electronics for Inventors, Fourth Edition, by Paul Scherz and Simon Monk.
I’m definitely interested in more electronics books for self study though.
Designing Embedded Hardware: Create New Computers and Devices by John Catsoulis.
Applied Embedded Electronics: Design Essentials for Robust Systems by Jerry Twomey.
There are lots more with varying levels of basics/advanced but the above two are what came to my mind immediately for self study.
It’s a fucking awful book. Sorry. It’s just terrible. It looks good but it’s mostly useless.
Pointless comment without some detail.
Are advertisements like this allowed on HN?
From what I've seen, generally speaking, yes. Even more so if the site wasn't submitted by the owner.
Self-promotion has even always been explicitly allowed here, but I believe the guidelines contain some verbiage to the effect of "your primary activity here should not be self-promotion". I have no official info, but just from observing things over the years, it appears that accounts who promote their own content overly frequently, and/or only post self-promotional content, are the ones that get shadow-banned or set to auto-dead status.
Is Simon on HN?
Slightly baffled why this is on HN and especially as the no.1 link. For this to be upvoted so high I expected to find a spectacular interactive learning experience someone has made for fun, or at least a substantial free book.
But it's just another book on Amazon like a dozen other books on the same subject.
Sometimes an idea is upvoted more than the content at the submitted link, I think. i.e. people that want to learn and enjoy the discussion here, regardless of whether they end up thinking the Monk book is a useful resource to do so.
Sometimes it's a paid botnet.
Yeah this is an ad
This looks cool! I’ve been looking for a good valve amp to build from a kit, ideally I want it to be integrated, EL34 tubes and at least 25 watts, anyone know of anything? Bonus points for designed/supplied in the UK.
Reminds me of those old RadioShack hobby electronic boards with all the different components to try and work with.
The best way to learn this stuff is hands on, build kits, those 200 in one things RadioShack used to sell, etc
what build kits are available now?
Anything you want! Check out Sparkfun and Adafruit, they have kits for everything!
The best suggestion to get a core review of the basic concepts as starter, and that Dave from the EEVblog [1] recommended several times, is the section Fundamentals of Radio Electronics from [2] - "The Arrl Handbook for Radio Communications" . Plus you get all the other stuff around Radio.
It will cover all the basics. Old ones can be found on the intertubes. It is now a classical. Even used 2015 versions go for $300 dollars or more.
Knowledge structuring is key for self-taught learning. I've found that organizing resources using MECE principles (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive) significantly improves the learning curve, especially for complex technical topics.
Will I finally understand transistors?
The BBC's Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity [0] documentary really made it click for me. The historical development and the conceptual development are woven together nicely.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_Awe:_The_Story_of_El...
What is the most challenging concept about transistors? I think the classic valve analogy (AKA Art of Electronics "Transistor Man") works to a large extent. To fully understand the physics requires a lot more but in between, there are relatively simple equations that describe the main current flow as related to the control terminal's voltage or current depending on the transistor type.
To go from single transistor to multi-transistor circuits was a big leap for me, but most of it is understanding how particular subcircuits work and recognizing them as blocks of a larger circuit.
BJTs were a real pain. Uncooperative exponentials fighting each other, or something like that, if I haven’t managed to forget successfully…
The exponential model tying collector current to base-emitter voltage is why I think most old-school references just treat BJTs as a fixed gain base-current amplifier. Of course it doesn't help that the gain is unknown and varies with process parameters!
I actually have the 3rd edition of this book, and, yea I think it explained transistors pretty well.
Mind, I don’t remember any of it, I never applied it, but at the time, it explained it to me.
No. This book won’t teach you that because based on the author’s previous work he doesn’t either. He knows how to sell books.
If you really want to know how transistors work and how to use them properly it’s going to be difficult as they sit on a fairly large pile of algebra and theory. If you don’t know this you might be able to get simple circuits working by cutting and pasting bits but you won’t be able to get past that ever.
The best references on this are actually The Art of Electronics. Not necessarily the main book but the associated student manual. Also the book Experimental Methods in RF Design by Wes Hayward actually has the most useful functional description and modelling approach of transistors.
Depends if you want the engineer’s perspective or the device physics perspective.
I think the MOSFET circuit diagram has always made more sense to me because you can see intuitively see the “plunger” as the control input.
The function can be understood as a traffic cop at the intersection of a major road and a small 1 lane road.
He has instructions to only let cars down the major road if cars also come down the small road.
When a small trickle of cars come down the small road the intersection can act like a dimmer switch. It can also take a very small signal, and with a secondary more powerful input, amplify it.
But if you quickly alternate between no cars and lots of cars that dimmer switch acts like a toggle switch giving you 1s and 0s.
The physics is basically, when you sandwich two elements in close proximity that give up their electrons in a very specific way you get the macro phenomenon described above.
The reason the elements give up electrons this way also happens to be at the heart of a lot of cool concepts of math and is a demonstrable proof of some physics that used to be just theory. Learning the physics of transistors can teach you concepts that tie together the history of science from Ancient Greece to Quantum physics.
“Amplification” has to be one the most misunderstood concepts In electronics
No signal is really “boosted” by some weird process. What happens is a very powerful DC signal (i.e constant) is selectively allowed through, being mediated by the input signal. The “volume knob” on a power amp works by ATTENUATING that constant DC signal prior to “amplification”
Thanks, now my left ear hurts. Haha. All I know is it goes to 11
(I love that you’re passionate about the details and it is certainly beautiful to imagine it the way you describe. Im picturing an ocean and the mediation little birds flying down and sculpting the crests of waves. The attenuation is like the Venetian MOSE flood barriers.)
Honestly just spend a few hours talking to Claude about them, I had a few breakthrough moments doing that.
put this prompt and share the response:
You summarize the past convestion in this thread. - Start with a overall summary in a single paragraph - Then show a bullet pointed list of the most interesting illustrative quotes from the piece - Then a bullet point list of the most unusual ideas - provide a longer summary that covers points not included already - Finally, Step by step/phase by phase understanding of the ideas discussed above
Probably needs (2022) in the title. The book is available on libgen for anyone who wants to take a look.
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I've got "Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series" as a PDF from a gopher hole:
gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/ia/details/neetsmodules_202003
The whole directory it's amazing too: gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/links/
Also, there's Usenet. Subscribe to to sci.electronics.repair and sci.electronics. Outdated? Delayed answers? ok, but you will get correct ones and if you set your learning at a slower but dedicated pace, with no distractions (turn the notifications off), with either PDF or Physical books and a electronic simulator like TkGate, you will get the theory at really fast speeds.
I have been wanting a tutorial like this. Thanks
So, is this book any good?
I keep putting off looking for something along his topic. Mostly becasue I want to learn to repair electronics. I have audio equipment that doesn't work right that I'm pretty sure just needs a small repair, but I'm stuck thinking about throwing it away becasue idk how to fix it. Pro repairs cost almost as much as what I have for some of them.
I was in the same boat. Had a pair of speakers go bad about a month ago, opened em up, saw a bunch of bulged capacitors. Tried my hand at replacing them, wasted way too much time doing it; in the end I didn't fix them. I either burnt something while desoldering or something else was borked.
I bought a new pair, but I walked away from it with more or less of a warm and fuzzy feeling that I did what I could. And a semi-decent soldering station, so next time this happens I will try again.
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The answer key to the first quiz says "1. a"
What are you trying to convey?
Is it not obvious? The number of protons is the atomic number. If "c" was the answer, ions couldn't exist.
> Is it not obvious? The number of protons is the atomic number. If "c" was the answer, ions couldn't exist.
The answer key, unless it has changed since you wrote your comment, has the correct answer of (a) for that question (midway down page 3). You seem to have scrolled to the very end of the document which has the answers to a completely different section.
Answers: 1. a
"Don't bother learning anything. AI will do all of this grunt work soon. You will be free to do what you really want"
It kind of misses the point that many people actually want to know how things work and how to design and build things. This isn't going to go away.
Is this a random quote? Or something said on the page or this thread?
It seems to be random as neither the discussion here nor the submitted page has anything like it to either be a quote or paraphrasing of something.
there will be new jobs.