So for my birthday last week, my wife bought me a Radio Shack Electronics Learning Lab kit, with both basic and digital worksbooks written by Forrest Mims (who I've heard is respected in this area)
Uh, saying Forrest Mims is respected as the writer of how-to electronics books is sort of like saying G Harry Stine wrote a book about Model Rocketry that wasn't half-bad.
This is a must-have by Mims:
"Getting Started In Electronics"
That book was as useful to me for electronics as Stine's Handbook was for Model Rocketry. As I did some googling to dig up the following, I see that over time it has sold 1.3 million copies.
https://www.forrestmims.com
Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0945053282/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20
Sample of what one of the pages is like:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mightyohm/3079379002/
Short background on the creation of the book:
https://blog.makezine.com/archive/2...ting_started_in_ele.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890
Never had the Learning Lab kit, so I cannot give any insights into that. But I gotta say, even with the lab, and even with Mims' other books, I think you should get "The Handbook of Electronics" by G. Forrest Mims.
Uh, I mean - "Getting Started In Electronics", by Forrest Mims III. Because for a lot of people, that still is their "handbook" for electronics. Sure is mine.
Even with the Lab, you really want to know why things work. Not just that if you hook them up, that they will either work , not work, or sometimes "let out the magic smoke".
BTW - Mims was into model rocketry in the late 1960's and early 70's. He wrote some electronics articles for Model Rocketry Magazine. One of them was for a "ram-air guidance" system intended to make a model home in onto the sun. When the Ram-Air guidance system itself turned out to have a fatal flaw in concept, he moved on to other projects. I have no doubt he could have made the sun-homing part work if he had used a conventional type control system, such as external control surfaces driven by the smallest model airplane servos circa 1970 (though they were not very small or light), but his focus was on a neat type of control concept (the ram-air), not the sun-homing.
He helped create a small company named MITS to sell some rocket electronic devices. The focus shifted to non-rocket electronics. And eventually, they came up with the Altair 8800, the worlds first Mini-Computer KIT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800
- George Gassaway