Lindy wrote:
>
> 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.

I don't have answers to this, just an observation.  When I was a lad,
electronics was my hobby.  I guess, had I been born later, it would have
been computing (which probably explains why the hobby has become an old
person's game - but I digress).  Anyway, I read electronics magazines and
used to enjoy making things - usually circuits out of those magazines.  I
knew the basics of what each component did, knew Ohms law, but - that took
me only so far.  I doubt I would even have gotten to the point that I
could design something in any way complex.  There was a barrier I couldn't
really see past.

And then I finished school and studied electrical engineering.  It was
hard work (but much was fun, as well).  And toward the end of it, in my
last year, a friend of mine asked if I had any idea how to build a video
digitiser (using the components of the late '80s), and I sat down for a
couple of hours and sketched out a circuit that we turned into a
moderately successful commercial product:
http://www.nickm.launch.net.au/ProjectArchive/rascan.html

In the few years I had been at university, something had "clicked" for me
- I was far more capable than before.  Well, one would hope so, I guess! 
But I have no idea what "baby steps" had been taken to get from A to B.

So - other than doing an EE degree, I don't have an answer.  I suspect
that it is simply a big step to climb.


David Meiklejohn


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