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The shift from discrete components to "black box" ICs has definitely changed how kids (and adults) learn electronics. There's something visceral about building a radio with just a few transistors and a coil that you just don't get from plugging a sensor into an Arduino. No Starch Press has consistently been great at finding that middle ground where the projects are engaging but the underlying fundamentals aren't sacrificed for the sake of a quick success.
In the 1960s, Kosmos made the best electronics sets available. If you went through the kits, you received a complete undergraduate course in electronics (less the calculus).
I figure it's fair enough, since this is a great but not free book, to drop https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/ - a truly amazing, and in my opinion extraordinarily well written and organized free learning resource.
It's a labor of love and a great reference to go back to, but I wouldn't recommend it for newcomers.
Traditional books benefit from having an editor who (ideally) asks questions like "who are you writing for", "what's the best order to introduce ideas", and "how much detail is enough". If you don't ask these questions, you often end up getting too deep into the weeds or jumping back and forth between ideas in ways that can be difficult to follow. To give you a specific example, the guide spends a lot of time on some of the more obscure theories in DC network analysis before even defining what a battery is, capacitors and inductors are explained in the DC section by focusing on their AC characteristics, there is a ton of unnecessary quantum physics trivia ahead of explaining what a diode is, discussion of op-amps kicks off with an odd reference to calculus, etc.
Again, I don't mean that as a criticism, it's just that (properly edited) books have their merits.
Same problem with O'Reilly books after they lost their editors. Technical accuracy doesn't substitute for pedagogical structure. A newcomer drowning in detail at chapter two isn't learning, they're just quitting.
Not a kid but what are the next steps after this book? I've been trying to find the steps of the ladder between "playing with muxes and clocks" and "designing a USB3 peripheral", but that has been a challenge in itself.
Don't wish to write my usual rant on this here but that's the curse of electronics books. You get taught by a recipe book but you don't leave with enough skills to design your own one. Nor do you know which recipes should be served together. It requires a much lower level of understanding and that is hard.
I got taught via recipe books then studied EE at university and had to throw everything away. Then I started in industry and had to throw that away again. There's a huge moat between the two ends.
Make 5-10 of multivibrators each on different schemeatics. Bonus point - make them as fast as you can - starting from the prototyping stage and finishing with the device ready to be either gifted or used as a lab generator.
But playing with clocks and multiplexer is definitely not a beginning of the ladder.
The gap you're describing is real. For me, Horowitz and Hill's Art of Electronics bridged a lot of it, then USB-specific stuff like Jan Axelson's USB Complete. High-speed PCB layout is its own cliff — that took years of ruined boards to internalize.
Is it me, or are hobby electronic shops much harder to find today, like the one that sells Arduino, basic RCL's, and common IC's? I am not sure if it's just a trend that everything is sold online or if the interest is shifting towards software.
Because china is taking over in that sector, why should I pay triple when I can purchase it straight from the manufacturer. You can find anything electronics related on aliexpress.
Parts kits for electronics books are kind of a trap. You end up with exactly the wrong resistor for the circuit you actually want to build next. Better to just order a grab bag assortment from Tayda or AliExpress and learn to read a BOM.
Amazon.de for example already has it(for preorder). Oreilly books online has the first edition available right now. I reckon they might add the second revision when it comes out.
The evidence on self-directed tinkering vs. structured curricula is genuinely mixed. Kids who build circuits from first principles tend to develop stronger debugging intuitions, but as far as I know, longitudinal studies on retention are sparse. Anecdotally, the hands-on approach seems to stick.
