Thesis and Scope of this book (Introduction)
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It is a great disservice and a sad state of affairs that most books on electronics are of little help to the reader. For a field of technology which has completely changed our civilization, they could certainly do better.
Most books on electronics suffer from one of the following drawbacks:
Usually, they are a mile wide but an inch deep. They try to cover everything, but cover nothing. They can run to a thousand pages long. Should you drop one on your foot, you would be sent to the hospital for major surgery.
Most books are not written with any applied pedagogy concepts, and are not very good in teaching.
Most books do not emulate the natural learning process. They are most often just a collection of equations which you must memorize. And as soon as a novel circuit is seen, there is no understanding of how to apply those equations which were memorized.
Most books cover information which, while true and informative, has little significance to the reader. The first chapter of most books is semiconductor chemistry and physics. And yet, that information is never applied later in book or reader's life. This book treats semiconductor devices as black boxes, governed by behavior and equations gathered experimentally.
College textbook cost continues to climb. Another edition or a book appears again next year, but the books are essentially clones of each other, with chapters rearranged every year so that college students cannot reuse a book from the previous year.
The author has started to learn electronics seriously at the age of twelve. He has been helped along by a mentor. All knowledge learned was from taking electronics apart and repairing it, soldering, and occasionally getting burned (be it from the soldering iron, an overheated resistor, or an improperly operated transistor).
Electronics cannot be learned quick and on demand, and especially when people have little need for learning it. Learning electronics “engineering” in college is usually the most artificial and pre-packaged form of learning.
Many expect to go to college on someone else's money, drink beer and have fun with the opposite gender, randomly choose electronics as a career after two years of undeclared major, do it for less than two years, and expect a 80k engineering job straight out of college. However, it takes a lot more of effort and dedication to actually learn something, and to have the right to a well-paying job in this economy.
This book is oriented for, and dedicated to technicians, hobbyists, experimenters, inventors, tinkerers, confused students, and hands-on people.
One of my life goals is to undo the fact that the mentioning of "electronics as a hobby" returns a blank and a pointless look.
