Hitting the High Notes

In college, I was constantly told by my professors how important it was to keep a lab notebook.  They were right.  Anyone who does technical things, either professionally or as a hobby, needs to keep a good notebook.  As you progress through your hobby or career, the value of your notebooks increases.  The little nuggets of hard-won knowledge are priceless.  You can refer back to old notes and find solutions to current problems.  You can look back at what you tried before and find out if it did or didn't work.  You can track your progression over time.  There are lots of other benefits, too.

Now imagine you suddenly got access to the notebooks of some very experienced engineers.  You can imagine they would be full of useful information.  Those notebooks certainly wouldn't  relieve you of the obligation of taking your own notes, but they would be very valuable.  Well, now you can.

Today, while visiting one of my favorite websites, embedded.com, I came across this article which is more or less a review of a new, free, e-book from Texas Instruments.  I want to thank David Ashton for writing that review and I highly recommend you read it. I won't repeat his work: he's done a much better job of reviewing it than I could.

Embedded.com is geared primarily toward working engineers (although hobbyists should still read it!)  Since a lot of what I write is aimed at hobbyists, I want to take a little different path.  I want to tell you why should read the book and how you should use it.

Since this book is essentially a collection of notes from working engineers, it assumes you know what all the terms mean.  For example, there is a section on modeling capacitors.  It briefly mentions equivalent series resistance (ESR) and equivalent series inductance (ESL), but doesn't really explain what they are.  A typical hobbyist probably won't really know what those terms mean.  But that stuff is very important when it comes to how to actually use capacitors in a circuit and why.  So here is what I recommend. Find a section of the book that is either relevant to what you are doing or that seems interesting.  Read briefly through it and Google the terms you don't understand.  Use the full names when possible (equivalent series resistance instead of esr) since you will get better results.  Read through the explanation: Wikipedia often has good explanations.  Then come back and read that section of the book again with your new knowledge.  You will likely find a lot of mysterious things, like why certain types of capacitors are needed for different uses, will suddenly be much clearer.

As I mentioned above, don't just look up things as needed.  Skim through the book looking for things that seem interesting or useful.  Read those and Google what you don't know.  Taking in the new knowledge in the context of how and why it is used will help to make the concepts much clearer than if you were just reading a textbook that explains them out of context.

I think this ebook is a great resource for hobbyists (and engineers!)  Texas Instruments is huge and they produce a LOT of good documents.  Not to mention useful parts.  So download the book now.  You will have to register with TI, but that isn't a bad thing.  They might notify you of new, interesting parts and documents.  Keep the book easily available on your computer and check it out often.  Treat it as a virtual mentor, always available to ask questions.

Analog Engineer's Pocket Reference