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.
Quite. Any electronics course that starts with Chapter 1: Algebraic Approximations, the first section of which is entitled Large Asymptotic Approximation, strikes me as being more theoretical than practical and certainly not for beginners.
No, that is exactly where it must start. I'm sorry but designing anything more useful than an LED chaser or blinking WS2812 lights requires mathematics.
[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.