Greetings again,

      A while back several people gave me some good recommendations
for books to start out in EE.  Thought I'd restate my request with an
alteration in meaning.

I'm a computer programmer, and while I respect EE, at it's purest form
it's really not for me. I have some nifty ideas for devices I would
like to implement, but since I lack the EE knowledge to do so, thought
I'd try and get a basic understanding of EE.

If everything had to be done with transistors, resistors and various
other low-level parts I'd probably not have started. What makes me
interested in EE from a programmer point of view is that today we have
a lot of nice hardware that abstracts the lower level "physical" layer
of EE.  Pics being a good point.

As I browse Circuit Cellar or websites, I see a lot of nifty little
components that do specific things. Like a chip that is a self
contained wifi container, a single chip GPS container, etc, etc.

So where I'm learning toward is learning just enough so I can buy
these kind of containers/chips/IC's and use them just as I would in a
program.  From a logic point of view they are the same thing as a
function/procedure/object.  It takes in input and gives an output.

Just with EE, you have more things to take into consideration.
Functions don't care about power usage in fear of frying the component
the in's and out's are defined.

So I'm wondering am I out of luck, or do I really have to spend the
time learning everything from the principles of physics to programming
a PIC/FPGA/etc, or is there a quicker "if you just want to know how to
connect various things together and make them work".  Besides it seems
most of these components use a serial interface, and not sure how an
i/o line works exactly. Is that the same thing as a parallel/serial
ports data pin for i/o?

Thanks for listening,
Josh
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