Forrest M. MimsBesprekingen

Mims explained electronics to me.

I think this book mislead me more than it taught me. I remember as a kid being frustrated by my inability to make circuits work, and I think this book's simplistic descriptions are partially to blame.

The book emphasizes electron current instead of conventional current, as if this is somehow more instructive or more correct. In fact, depending on the materials the component is made out of, current can be carried by electrons (metal), ions (batteries, electrolytic capacitors, neon lamps), holes (semiconductors), or even free protons (fuel cells). Conventional current abstracts away this distinction between charge carriers so you can focus on the big picture. Teaching everything backwards — as if only electron current matters — just confuses things, for no benefit.

The drawings show little electron cartoons jumping out of wires, getting "stuck" inside resistors, being blocked by the field of an FET, or stuck on one side of a thyristor with none being able to get to the other side, etc. This is not how circuits work. A resistor slows down all the current in the entire circuit, not just the electrons on one side of it. Electrons don't all move in unison with each other, they bounce around randomly, and only the net drift of billions of particles matters. It should be thought of as a fluid, not as individual particles. Maybe it would be more fair to say that the book was a little over my head as a kid. But the pictures are misleading, and those are what I focused on at the time.

There are problems with the descriptions, too. Although they make sense to someone already familiar with electronics, the book is aimed at people who aren't. "Ground", for instance, is described as "the point in a circuit at zero voltage, whether or not it's connected to ground". I struggled with these descriptions for years. Only when I got to college did I finally start to learn this stuff, rather than poke in the dark and hope that things worked. (You can pick any point in a circuit and call it ground. It's just a reference point for making voltage measurements, and there are common conventions for which point you should choose. It's as simple as that.)

I think William Beaty's Electricity Misconceptions pages are much better at explaining electricity in an intuitive, but accurate way.

This is probably the best book to understand some basic concepts in electronics. It is written for persons without any previous experience in electronics therefore it is very easy to read.

Outdated, but still some cool ideas.

I don't think there's much left to redeem this book, other than the awesome figures, including one of an "experimental telephone handset" on page 147 that has a pic of the phone that everybody in the universe owned in the 90s, and one of an "advanced semiconductor-laser display system" that is probably larger than my apartment and these days is now probably smaller than a pinhead.

This book definitely shows its age, but still has some relatively decent ideas for projects to create with LEDs. The basic physics behind LED operation hasn't changed, but the technology is way better now than it was when this book was published in 1973. Worth a browse through this book just to check out the awesome hair and outfits on the people in the illustrations. Groovy!

A good introduction to semiconductor electronics, suitable for late secondary / high school students or anyone keen to learn more in later life. The book explains the concepts well in its unique style (handwritten with many many diagrams) and finishes with a 100 mini-projects or ideas to illustrate the foregoing text. I first read this book over 20 years ago where it set me up well for passing school exams and projects, and was pleased to rediscover its charm these years later.

Simple and easy to build projects -- a good one for beginners.

This is a self-learning programmed text for teaching the basics about digital computers. It is bound with a plastic ring-binder that allows the book to open flat like a flip chart on your desk.

My Favorite Chapter. Chapter 8 tells about the PIP-1, a computer designed by Mims for a series of lectures at UCLA. He never got around to building the PIP-1 until he started working on this book for Radio Shack. The PIP-1 (Programmable Instruction Processor) is an extremely simple 4-bit computer with only 8 instructions in its instruction set -- a real computer, nevertheless. It is programmed in machine language.

About the Author, Forest M. Mims III

A graduate of Texas A&M with a major in government and minors in English and history, Mims has followed a successful career as a science author, researcher, lecturer, and syndicated columnist.

Mims wrote a column for Popular Electronics that lasted from 1975 until the last issue in 1985.

Mims wrote a popular series of Engineer's Notebooks for Radio Shack.

Mims edits The Citizen Scientist, the journal of the Society for Amateur Scientists.

Mims is a Christian and a creationist. He is an advocate for Intelligent Design. He is also a skeptic of global warming.

In 2008, Discover Magazine named Mims one of the "50 Best Brains in Science."

Trivia. Forrest Mims is the most widely read electronics author in the world -- 60 books, 7.5 million copies sold.

More Trivia. Mims' "Engineer’s Notebook" series for Radio Shack are hand-lettered and hand-illustrated to match the look of Forrest’s own laboratory notebooks. All that's missing is the smell of resin-core solder.

Still More Trivia. Forrest holds the honor of writing the very first book about personal computers, The Altair 8800 Operator's Manual (1975).

And Yet More Trivia. While Mims was writing the Altair manual, Bill Gates and Paul Allen were writing their version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair. That was the start of Microsoft.

This book was written by one of the founding members of MITS, a pioneer in the personal computer industry. MITS created the Altair 8800 featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. Mims wrote the manual for it. Mims eventually donated his Altair to the Smithsonian Institution.

One of the most interesting features in this book is found in Chapter Eight where Mims describes the PIP-1, a computer he designed and built from scratch.

This is a self-learning book with lots of checkpoints to assess your progress. Each chapter ends with a reading list.

If you are interested in the early history of personal computing, this book is a must-read.

This book was written for people who want to install a security system at home or at their place of business. Mims teaches the basics about security systems. He discusses examples of both commercial systems and do-it-yourself alarm systems. After reading this book, people with little or no electrical or mechanical background can install a security system.

This book was written in 1979 to be used in conjunction with Radio Shack's Semiconductor Reference Handbook and other data books. The book is divided into two major sections: digital and linear. The chips in each section are organized according to function, not numerical sequence.

The nice thing about this book is that it looks like an engineer's notebook right down to the look and feel of hand-lettered comments, hand-drawn circuit diagrams, and grid ruling on 8.5x11", three-hole-punched paper. All that's missing is the smell of resin-core solder.

An okay book on Op-Amps. There are better books out there.