Kryten said:
I feel the AoE is a good starting foundation text.
It's more that that in that it also shows people more advanced techniques,
even if it necessarily glosses over a few of the mathematical details at
times. As I seem to recall, it was initially written from class notes that
were taught in a physics department, where the emphasis was on transferring
enough knowledge to get people building real, useful instrumentation. Compare
that course of development to the standard EE curriculum, which emphasizes the
ability to analyze pretty much any circuit in great detail, but has much more
limited emphasis on synthesis as it applies to the real world. (The EE
synthesis emphasis seems to be largely in areas where there are "nice" results
available, such as filter design... but with, e.g., Butterworth, Chebyshev,
etc. rather than "weird" hybrid combinations like AoE tends to advocate.) A
standard EE curriculum doesn't include in-depth discussions of capacitor
types, construction techniques (including those for high-frequency design),
tables of "blue-chip" op-amps, etc.
Now the internet is here, they can google for anything, though of course the
quality is rather varied. But having read the AoE, people can apply their
own judgement in sifting out good circuits from bad.
Good point. There actually aren't that many Internet electronics web sites
that are "tutorial" in nature, since of course producing one is a very large
time commitment; instead, though, you find *many* "circuits" collections, and
their quality is all over the board.