US Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series
jacquesricher.com
jacquesricher.com
Would recommend The Art of Electronics (just grab the 2nd edition and the student manual - it's fine) or Practical Electronics for Inventors.
Also stay away from Mimms books[1] and Make stuff. They're mostly glossy crap that doesn't actually have any content and are chock full of mistakes.
If you want to wire shit to an arduino, don't buy a book, just google it.
[1] Yes I know this is controversial but I started there and had to unlearn it all. It's a bad foundation.
2. Some of the fundamentals are actually wrong, particularly in Getting Started in Electronics.
3. It deals with basic construction and very basic fundamentals only really.
If you want to build a kit, it's fine but if you want to create something, forget it.
Despite all the things I left out I am grateful that I had it. If it went on and on about engineering calculations, I would not have had the capacity or patience. I would recommend other books if asked by an adult, but is something better out now for kids?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=160+in+one+electronics&tbm=i...
TAE, Practical Electronics for Inventors, Mims, and Charles Platt's series for Make tend to be the ones that come up most frequently, but I'd be curious to hear if you've found others that are excellent.
Is there a list of what's wrong somewhere? A quick Google does not reveal anything...
I worked for a military contactor and had to deal with what RAF 'engineers' did to our radio kit.
My current main scope, a Tek 453, was ex military and it had some after market repairs done by a monkey with soldering kit. Took me a couple of days to clean it up properly.
Well, they're not meant to get people on the way to understanding James Clerk Maxwell.
They're meant to get high schoolers without much (if any) formal science training to the level that they can safely maintain, operate and repair the specific electrical and electronic components used in Navy fleet applications.
So yes, everything about how this stuff actually works is simplified, and often even "dumbed down".
So I wouldn't use these guides as reference material if I were trying to take college-level versions of these courses as you'd just have to unlearn and re-learn too much to make it useful. But there's a method to the madness here.
The key here is "maintain, operate and repair".
Army training manuals are generally great for that.
They are not a resource to learn design from. If someone's objective is to learn how to make things, they're a very bad place to start.
So our radios and avionics go out with a test set. The wrench monkeys install it in the airframe and it doesn't work (the term used by the guy on the phone). So we say take the thing out of the airframe, plug it into the test set and run the test cases. We get a call back saying it doesn't work and can we come out.
So I haul my arse up to the other end of the country by plane and arrive at the facility. What do I find?
They haven't used the test set (because it didn't work), opened the avionics unit and piddled with the power supply and managed to blow up both the test set and the GPS. This is blamed on a design fault on our part.
So I get the units shipped back and we post mortem it and find that they were using the wrong harness. The one we get bak is from a completely different unit and serial.
Design revision: Support 200v AC on the DC-DC converter input that expects 48v DC
This was my life for three years.
That's also why so much cash gets pissed out of the window in the defense sector...
To be fair, if you made a change like that and didn't change the harness to make it physically incompatible, that's not the user's fault. It might not be your fault either, but it most assuredly is somebody's fault.
In this case there are only so many combinations of MIL-DTL-22992 out there.
It wasn't even our harness. No idea where it came from. Serno didn't register, wasn't shipped with the device and wasn't approved (I know as I wrote the asset tracking software).
I still reckon they lost the official harness, rigged this one up and FUBARed it but the moment you point a finger, the professional cockroaches scurry away.
TAE is great if you've gone through university-level courses, understood (or at least was able to reproduce) the math but can't grok transistors without diagrams and formulae and know next to nothing about design principles.
For someone with no prior exposure, it's a terrible book. It explains very little about why things are the way they are.
Rules of thumb are great when you know what's behind them. When you don't, it's a shaky bridge to walk on.
TAoE isn't something you read cover to cover anyway, it's a reference book.
The whole point is to get someone from knowing nothing about electronics to being able to troubleshoot a system down to an offending circuit card, and replace the part. There are more advanced schools, such as the journeyman technician school, which works on breaking down some of the wrong information they might have picked up on over the course of applying these practical concepts, and building up enough knowledge to troubleshoot down to the component-level. That course will get them through things like back-plane wiring, ohm'ing out bad pins on cables that run through the ship (and therefore are impossible to easily touch end-to-end), and sometimes even gets to desoldering individual components on cards and replacing them, in order to save on paying Raytheon $4000 for a card that cost them $1.50 to make.
With that in mind, almost no one that goes through these courses actually goes on to become an engineer, or really strives to understand the true nature of the forces that make their systems possible. For the most part, you can take these students and give them a broken system with hot-swappable components and the schematics for it, and they could fix it. To me, that's the true measure of success of these books.