Learn electricity and electronics fundamentals without taking a formal course
79 comments
·April 5, 2025silisili
spit2wind
This page lists several ATT publications and has a link to a 1953 publication that could fit your description (and could have been a subsequent editini).
Otherwise, maybe you'd recognize the name as one of the other publications?
silisili
Nice! I browsed through the 1953 edition quickly, and it's very similar. So probably some updated version of that.
I was just blown away they send you all that material for free by simply applying. This would have been before the internet was big, so probably isn't as exciting now.
harshreality
Internet Archive has a 1961 edition, and it's mirrored on 4nn4's Archive.
https://archive.org/details/principlesofelec0000unse_a3j0
(AA can be searched using an archive.org file slug, e.g. "principles...a3j0", or obviously by using the title)
inejge
> I was just blown away they send you all that material for free by simply applying.
It was a hangover from their days a quasi-socialist, monopolistic enterprise ("We're the Phone Company"), when they could afford to be "inefficient" in that way -- scare quotes because it's difficult to calculate the cost of preparation and dissemination against all the high-value careers the material may have inspired. These days, an accountant would glance at the cost and cut it out without thinking twice.
ozfive
It is exciting! I used to read the Ma-Bell manuals in the science and math library at the University of Oregon.
Edited for emphasis.
jaggederest
I found Moritz Klein's videos very interesting to help me understand practical aspects of circuit design as related to analog synthesizers:
mwlp
I haven't watched any of the lectures, but there's also Georgia Tech's Analog Circuits for Music Synthesis https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOunECWxELQS5bMdWo9Vh...
sunshine-o
Any recommendation for open source software or website where one can learn about electricity in an interactive or gamified way?
YZF
I can also highly recommend "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill.
megadata
That's an awful recommendation for an entry level electronics.
analog31
I learned from the 1st edition, in 1984. It's worth noting that the book was actually written for scientists rather than engineers. I was a math and physics major. By a long standing tradition, an electronics course is a standard part of the undergrad physics curriculum.
My dad had "Electronics for Scientists" by Malmstadt et al., 1962. His employer put a bunch of scientists through an electronics course.
The contrast was pretty remarkable. It's all about vacuum tubes, with some introduction of transistors. The 1st edition of AoE had a reasonable amount of material on digital circuits for back then, but I imagine a similar contrast between 1984 and today.
The span of 40+ years has certainly changed how I do electronics.
WalterBright
After The Cat passed, I found a book under her bed entitled "Electronics for Cats". I wonder what she had been plotting.
vivzkestrel
i don't recommend this book at all. I know nothing about electronics. Think blank slate and this book went straight over my head. I caught it from the comments of one such post on HN
_moof
Try pairing it with the companion "Learning the Art of Electronics." It's a hands-on lab workbook that complements the main book. It's very practical.
moffkalast
Or better yet, the "Learning the Learning the Art of Electronics" which breaks down the companion book.
rramadass
AoE is not meant for people who are starting from zero. Pair it with some other "popular electronics" kind of books and it will start making better sense. One recommendation is Practical Electronics for Inventors by Paul Scherz and Simon Monk. For theory see Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronic Circuits by Anant Agarwal and Jeffrey Lang.
vivzkestrel
while this book is simpler, i am still struggling with a lot of stuff, here page 6 https://imgur.com/a/83FQnAx What graph did they plot to derive delta Q / delta T I can tell that on the y axis they had time but I would have loved to see a representation of what the curve on the x axis would look like. A wire is uniform only in theory, in reality its area would keep fluctuating at every mm by very small amounts. Does this equation actually take the effect of this fluctuation. What does A1 and A2 look like, I am assuming A2- A1 = delta Q right? There needs to be an even more grounded book in electronics, something that you can show to a guy who literally has no idea about electronics in the slightest bit and by the end of the book, the guy is a master at it
masto
I found it impenetrable.
YZF
I already knew something by the time I read it so that must have helped. I guess you do need a certain maturity level (in the subject) to get started but once you have it (maybe from somewhere else) I think it's great.
It reminds me of my first time trying to learn assembly language when I was in my early teens. I just could not make any sense of it. I knew a little bit of PASCAL and BASIC at the time and that was just alien territory. When I came back a few years later after some exposure then it all came together.
Try going back to the book ;)
anthk
If you began with Forth, assembly wouldn't be that odd.
BenFranklin100
Horowitz and Hill is the canonical recommendation for novices, and a text that almost no novice actually learns from.
tonyedgecombe
Like the dragon book for compilers.
belter
That is like recommending a Knuth book for somebody wanting to learn Python.
Syzygies
That's what I learned from!
greatgib
Is the top link just an advertisement for a book to be bought or is it something I'm missing with the link? There are countless of books and website with that kind of content, but Google is good enough to find them...
mcshicks
I don't know, it's hard for me to know what the author means by "fundamentals". I looked at the table of contents from the amazon website, and somethings that I consider pretty fundamental like Thevenin's Theorem didn't seem to be listed there. By comparison it's in Chapter 1, page 9 on my copy of "The Art of Electronics". I'm not trying to knock the book, it could be very handy, but I would use the term "basics" as opposed to "fundamentals" to describe the content as I understand it.
e28eta
I really liked Practical Electronics for Inventors, Fourth Edition, by Paul Scherz and Simon Monk.
I’m definitely interested in more electronics books for self study though.
rramadass
Designing Embedded Hardware: Create New Computers and Devices by John Catsoulis.
Applied Embedded Electronics: Design Essentials for Robust Systems by Jerry Twomey.
There are lots more with varying levels of basics/advanced but the above two are what came to my mind immediately for self study.
leke
Are advertisements like this allowed on HN?
mindcrime
From what I've seen, generally speaking, yes. Even more so if the site wasn't submitted by the owner.
Self-promotion has even always been explicitly allowed here, but I believe the guidelines contain some verbiage to the effect of "your primary activity here should not be self-promotion". I have no official info, but just from observing things over the years, it appears that accounts who promote their own content overly frequently, and/or only post self-promotional content, are the ones that get shadow-banned or set to auto-dead status.
gsf_emergency_2
Is Simon on HN?
magic_hamster
Slightly baffled why this is on HN and especially as the no.1 link. For this to be upvoted so high I expected to find a spectacular interactive learning experience someone has made for fun, or at least a substantial free book.
But it's just another book on Amazon like a dozen other books on the same subject.
OJFord
Sometimes an idea is upvoted more than the content at the submitted link, I think. i.e. people that want to learn and enjoy the discussion here, regardless of whether they end up thinking the Monk book is a useful resource to do so.
megadata
Sometimes it's a paid botnet.
strunz
Yeah this is an ad
andy_ppp
This looks cool! I’ve been looking for a good valve amp to build from a kit, ideally I want it to be integrated, EL34 tubes and at least 25 watts, anyone know of anything? Bonus points for designed/supplied in the UK.
urda
Reminds me of those old RadioShack hobby electronic boards with all the different components to try and work with.
iancmceachern
The best way to learn this stuff is hands on, build kits, those 200 in one things RadioShack used to sell, etc
defraudbah
what build kits are available now?
iancmceachern
Anything you want! Check out Sparkfun and Adafruit, they have kits for everything!
When I was a teen, I applied to be an ATT lineman. At that time at least, they sent you a giant study guide that has everything one might want to know about electricity. I was actually blown away by the material.
I've since lost it, but wonder if it exists on the Internet somewhere. My cursory search didn't return anything.