Slashdot Mirror
New Interactive Basic Electronics Textbook Launched Online (circuitlab.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader compumike writes: The group that first brought schematics and circuit simulation to the browser has now released the first few chapters of Ultimate Electronics: Practical Circuit Design and Analysis, an interactive online textbook for people learning electronics. The materials released today cover about half of a first semester undergraduate electronics course.
[Disclaimer] I just skimmed it, I really should be doing something else.
That said, it looks well-organized and done with attention to detail. Kudos for tackling the hard stuff right on -- and to the beginners out there: don't fear to take that first step. It will pay off.
Totally kudos for being *really* usable without javascript. See, I'm the usual anti-javascript whiner around here[1]. Now I understand that the embedded simulations won't work for a javascript-challenged browser, that's OK; moreover, for me the formulae look TeXy -- I understand that they look much nicer to javascript-friendlier browsers, courtesy of (guessing here, didn't look) MathJax, but the thing is I'm fluent enough in TeX (you gotta, if you don't "do" javascript, right?) and TeX is a *much* nicer fallback than (gasp!) MathML or whatever.
It's not often that you can see these days someone going the extra mile to have their pages "degrade" gracefully. *Very* gracefully: the book still looks & feels gorgeous to us ascets.
Kudos, overall.
[1] Yes, I'm one of those folks who learnt as a child to not put everything I find on the street into his mouth.
I agree that a firm understanding of maths is vital for an understanding of electronics. The way that it is presented though looks to me as though the course would be best presented in a classroom environment. It is perfectly possible to present the maths and the practical aspects side-by-side; dumping Large Asymptotic Approximations on the unsuspecting student as chapter 1, part 1 is not the way to do it for a lot of people.