Comment by donthellbanme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donthellbanme | Hacker News Reader

I love Navy, and Army, training courses. They even have one on Watchmaking, or Watch Repair. They use a pocket watch, and a Elgin wrist watch, and completely Service both of them.

I wish more textbooks were written like this.

If I was a publisher, I would demand my technical writers lay out what they are trying to convey in a simple straight forward manner.

Hell--I see nothing wrong with using comic book format in order to convey knowledge.

My biggest gripe in college was being given a overly verbose "phone book" from the 80's for a course.

Where are the new texts though?

The arm forces must still have texts they write, but I don't see them on the internet?

I'm assuming there's no copyrights because we pay for the teaching material through taxes?

I'm specifically looking for new texts of Electronics, HVAC, Auto mechanics, Watch Repair, but that one might not be needed anymore, Machining, Programming, Computer repairing, Radio Repair, etc.

(I haven't looked that hard.)

The breadth of topics of WW2 field manuals and technical manuals is staggering. One of the manuals is essentially a list of other manuals, and there are a lot of them.

At least one manual has a reading level similar to "See Jane run", because of course they'd have had some soldiers being drafted who read at that level.

Books designed to actually impart knowledge are rare. Modern publishing is about spine size so a ton of filler.

So on the one hand I agree but equally these style of books can be extremely long winded and imprecise. It's the difference between training radio operators and training RF engineers.

I actually am building a little website for finding a balance between the two styles of writing, but it's really hard to get right.

Can you already share a link to your work in progress? Could be interesting to have a look at it.

Currently I haven't pushed literally anything but it will likely be hosted at lrsc.io.

I assume training follows with field repairs necessary to keep equipment running. With the miniaturization of tech, no one is going to be replacing chips or wires on boards, just swap the whole board with a spare.

Depends, because if you got the single components you can use them to repair multiple boards, while if you go the spare way you need to keep some spares for each specific board. So I think it's debatable whether the spare way is actually a better way or not. Maybe the best way would be a mix of the two: use a spare to be able to quickly repair the equipment but then later take the time to find out the single component that broke and replace it so the old board becomes a spare one. This way you can avoid having stacks of spares and you still have quick repairs.

As of 12 years ago, the CG was still using what looks to be the exact same basic electricity book (with the purple cover). I absolutely love that book and it really helped me understand electrical fundamentals.

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