>A discussion about how to get from beginner to the next step
>to someone knowledgeable about electronics is, IMHO, a better
>discussion.
>
>Am I wrong here? -
>When reading mathematics books they seem to spend about a page
>on the basics (if that much) before jumping right into the difficult
>stuff.  For electronics it seems to me that the approach is similar.
>I haven't found any good books that take a beginner slowly to each
>next step.  (If there is, I'd love to buy it!)  It's possible, too,
>that I just don't get it.  Yet.
>
>If you study music, say piano, then you go baby step by baby step
>from beginner.  When learning computer languages the approaches
>are similar.  Little by little.

One of the problems with electronics is that the components you see, and are 
annotated on a schematic, are not all the components in the circuit. With 
practically everything else that you study (except perhaps atomic and 
quantum physics) there are no stray 'invisible' components that can really 
FU your day. This is the area where many people get themselves into strife 
when knocking up circuits on a prototyping board. Other things like supply 
bypass capacitors can also have effects that people don't appreciate.

I remember a colleague who should really have known a lot better, hooking 
the ground terminal on the front panel of an oscilloscope to the ground of a 
computer he was looking to do some serving on, using about 3' of hook-up 
wire, removing the ground lead from the scope probe because it was in the 
way, and then wondering why he could not see any signals that he knew were 
there, clocking at 20MHz. The big open loop just put so much 50Hz hum on the 
screen that the signal he was looking for was totally swamped. Unfortunately 
this is the sort of thing that does catch beginners out - after all a piece 
of wire is just that, forgetting that it becomes a turn on a transformer of 
a magnetic field that envelopes the environment that is full of 50Hz 
interference.

It is the same with any schematic diagram - one of the journeyman when I was 
doing my apprenticeship said that it wasn't the components that they showed 
on the application note schematics, but the invisible stray ones they didn't 
show, that mattered or caught you out. 

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