ELECTRONICS FOR BEGINNERS
Hello! Welcome to our Electronics for Beginners page. If you’d like to get started in electronics I’d like to help.
Electronics has been my life-long hobby. I started learning electronics in the 6th grade. Our teacher would give us free time with creative playthings. I drifted to the batteries, light bulbs, magnets, wire wound around iron bars – even an old hand-cranked telephone generator. That led me to books on electricity in the kids’ library and then on to books on radio, TV & basic electronics, hobby and experimenters’ magazines and electronic kits. It turned into my electrical engineering career and is still my hobby. Guess what? Now one of our daughters is an electrical engineer!
This web page? I’m doing it for fun. The books and magazines were important in getting me started and I’m hoping to help others the same way.
Electronics for Beginners will be a chapter-by-chapter project, one topic at a time, growing as I find time to write. Maybe I can turn it into a book someday – we’ll see. For now I’ll just add a topic (chapter) at a time and maybe make revisions to chapters already written. This page is just links to those chapters. No schedule – just keep checking back to see what I’ve added.
Questions? Comments? Suggestions? E-mail me at the address to the right and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Enjoy.
Harry Trietley, SRQ Technology
CHAPTER 1: Electrons, Conductors, Insulators, Resistors
CHAPTER 2: Pressure, Flow, Resistance, Power
CHAPTER 3: Volts, Amps and Ohms
CHAPTER 5: Potentiometers and Variable Resistors
CHAPTER 7: Capacitors – Energy Storage
CHAPTER 8: Inductors – More Energy Storage
CHAPTER 11: Electrons, Holes & Semiconductors
CHAPTER 13: More Diodes (Schottky, Zener, LEDs and photodiodes)
SUGGESTED READING
This Electronics for Beginners project is proceeding slowly. If you’re wanting to go faster than I’m writing, here are some books I’m familiar with. All are available on Amazon and probably elsewhere.
Electronics for Kids – Play with simple circuits and experiment with electricity! Author: Yvind Nydal Dahl. Published by No Starch Press. An easy read – of course, it’s for kids. Lots of color illustrations and simple projects. Covers basic components, transistors, motors, generators, and basic digital integrated circuits. No analog ICs, no computers or microprocessors. 293 pages.
Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics. Authors: Stan Gibilisco and Simon Monk. Published by McGraw-Hill Education. It’s titled “Teach Yourself” but is written like a classroom textbook, complete with problems in each chapter and end-of-chapter quizzes (with answers at the back of the book.) Lots of detail on each subject. Basic Electronics includes everything from vacuum tubes to integrated circuits. Amplifiers, wireless and digital basics are included. (Circuit examples use transistors, not integrated circuits.) The last section, Specialized Devices and Systems, includes microcontrollers, Arduino, transducers, audio, lasers, modern communications systems and antennas. 745 pages.
And, of course, a Dummies book: Electronics All-in One for Dummies. Author: Doug Lowe. Published by John Wiley & Sons. Organized as 9 mini-books, it’s more hand-on and less theory than Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics. An easier read. I’d choose it over Teach Yourself unless you want to get more heavily into classroom-type theory. It doesn’t cover all the “Specialized Devices” that Teach Yourself does but spends a lot more time on microcontrollers and computers. Three of the mini-books cover Arduino, Basic Stamp and Raspberry Pi microprocessors. 934 pages.