Getting Started in Electronics
I got my first copy of Forrest M. Mims, III Getting Started in Electronics in the early 80 for $2.49. It did a better job of making the fundamentals of electronic circuits understandable to me than the courses I took in college.
The book uses intuitive examples to explain previously impenetrable concepts such as capacitance, impedance, and inductance, and does a great job of explaining how semiconductors work.
Even better, the last section of the book has over 100 easy-tomake circuits that beep, blink, and perform other fun stuff. This book manages to make electronics seem both accessible and magical at the same time. Many people I know speak fondly of this book as a big inspiration when they were younger. Link
Comments
Thanks very much for the kind words about "Getting Started in Electronics." Becasue Radio Shack stopped selling this and all other books, I receive many letters from teachers, studnets and experimenters about where to find it. The book has been republished in a more permanent version by Master Publishing and can be ordered at their site: www.forrestmims.com.
Best regards,
Forrest
Posted by: Forrest M. Mims III | February 1, 2006 10:34 AM
"It did a better job of making the fundamentals of electronic circuits understandable to me than the courses I took in college."
Boy and how. I got more out of Forrest's books in weeks of independent study than I did in months of perusing the old red & black ARRL books.
We hear alot about instantiating things like solar power and water purification in the third world for both humanitarian and development reasons. Almost all that gear will require maintenance at some time or another.
The corpus of Forrest's work, a copy of of this http://wndw.net/ book, some hand tools, protoboards and leaded components could be the core of a viral VocEd program to develop some indigenous tech support.
Posted by: George Lowry | February 1, 2006 3:30 PM
Forrest, it's great to see you're still kicking around! I loved the Engineer's Notebook. I built pretty much every circuit (well, except for the ones driving the memory chips--they seemed like a lot of work and I got the idea from the schematics anyway). The book long ago lost it's covers and is now kept in a 3-ring binder. I still refer to it whenever I need a subsection for my projects. Because of these books I've been able to build nixie clocks from scratch using decade counters, buffers, power transistors and the like and all kinds of other electronics stuff. At work people are jaded by fancy software, but making a handful of chips and some solder do what you want borders on magic! Thanks again.
Andy-
Posted by: Andy- | February 19, 2006 10:38 AM