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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

I actually started looking at this the other day on Open Courseware - as I'd set myself a resolution this year to put together a little embedded\SBC system and needed to understand electronics in more detail[0]. It's a little bit intimidating. For example in the first few sentences he started referring to Maxwell's equations in very familiar terms (something like "we all know about Maxwell's equations already...") which threw me slightly and made me wonder if there's probably a better introduction to electronics out there.

[0] = http://blog.mclemon.io/new-years-resolutions-2015

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For example in the first few sentences he started referring to Maxwell's equations in very familiar terms (something like "we all know about Maxwell's equations already...")

This, incidentally, is exactly like going to MIT.

While I don't disagree, 8.02 (Electricity and Magnetism), which basically spends the semester teaching Maxwell's equations, is a prereq for 6.002.

I took it, there is no need to fear, maxwell's equations aren't used at all for the problem sets. The only real mention of it I think was when Dr. Argawal derived Kirchoff's circuit laws, and then later when mentioning cross talk.

So. There's no vector calculus, but there are some easy differential equations later on and the T.A's work through some sample problems to bring people up to speed.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a better intro to electronics, it is excellent.

Excellent, thanks for confirming. I've got a lot on my plate so presuming this was the famous MIT "drinking from a firehose" I decided to shelve it for the time being. But if it's one of the better ways to get started, I'll give it another try soon.

Edit: I just watched through the intro again and I clearly wasn't paying attention at all when I first watched this, as he says exactly what you described. I will blame my wandering mind on the fact that I was hungry and my girlfriend was cooking up something tasty in the kitchen at the time :)

edX is not OpenCourseware. Very different courses. Same material taught, but OCW is just lecture captures of MIT classes. edX is full courses designed for a global audience.

I figured that there may be differences, but they'd be covering the same materials for the most part. Also I can't see how to access the edX materials, so there's currently no way to follow this course other than checking out the OCW resources. I'll keep my eyes peeled for this opening up again on edX in future.

You don't have to know physics to benefit from 6.002x.

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