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[Quoting fortney]

Thanks, CMoy. I downloaded QUICS and will see what I can do. My knowledge of electronics ebbs and flows and is presently in an ebb tide so I will no doubt spend some time confused...

F

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Quics is a Linux program that I know nothing about installing. I did download the 1/07 version of MacSpice for my OSX10.2.8 and will see what I find.

F

Carl And Jerry stories, originally published in Popular Electronics 1954-1964.

Carl And Jerry

Each story is both entertaining and educational. You pick up basic electric/electronic concepts with light-hearted humor and drama.

Sample Story (2Meg PDF)

On-Demand printing, so each book is expensive ($15), and there are 5 volumes! I went for the whole set, and I'm not sorry.

[Edited by PRR on 04-05-2008 at 11:17 PM.]

Can anyone recommend a few? The ones I used are out of print. They had to replace them with dumbed down labs to let the students pass the lab class.

One other immensely useful book is the Manual of Electronic Servicing and Tests and Measurements by Robert C. Glenn Jr. EVen if you don't use everything in the book, it'll help you think things through.

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[Quote]

the best way to learn electronics theory is to supplement a good book or two with a lab manual from a good technical college.

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It wouldn't surprise me if the kinds of lab manuals that you're referencing were usually not available to the general public, only to students at those colleges. However, if you google the web, you can find several electrical engineering schools which have put their lab assignments online. MIT's OpenCourseware offerings are the most extensive and are meant to be downloaded by anyone who is interested in the subject, not just MIT students. The multimedia archive includes video lectures, labs, homework assignments, exams, even the course syllabus. There are several EE related courses in the OpenCourseWare curriculum. The main drawback is that these courses may have pre-requistes and/or co-requisites. To get the most out of them, you may need to know (or at least be in the process of learning) advanced math or physics.

Other schools may not have formally put their course materials online for the general public, but you can access them. In many cases, the home directories for the courses or of the professors themselves are exposed to the public internet. They may not be as organized and complete as the MIT offerings.

Don't forget to download a copy of the TI-TINA circuit simulation software. It's free, and you can use it to work through many labs and textbook examples.

[Edited by cmoy on 05-07-2008 at 12:48 AM.]

www.tech-systems-labs.com/books.htm

Try also

www.tech-systems-labs.com
for more useful information

[Edited by fa-schmidt on 05-07-2008 at 10:22 AM.]

[Edited by morsel on 05-08-2008 at 10:54 AM.]

for starters, I used SwitchCAD / LTSpice, a highly regarded free Spice simulator from Linear. It is free from their website: http://www.linea...tools/software/

LTSpice has most of the parts that I regularly use and it is easy to set up and get it going.

For better modeling, I used OrCAD.

for PCB work, I use Altium / Protel DXP.

I have also used EWB/MultiSim but its interface is a little bit clutterred. and the XSpice engine isn't widely supported by other vendors.

For mixed simulations involving microcontrollers, I use Proteus.

However, the modern way to do this is to use a pcb CAD program like ExpressPCB to draw the schematic and generate a pcb layout. These programs will also output computer files that can be sent to board manufacturers, who can make the board for you (even one-of orders). Many circuit simulation programs like TINA have pcb generation abilities.

Ok enough of this blabbering let me get to the links.

If you are just starting out with "power electronics" I recommend you start in ECET 257, this class is titled Consumer Power Electronics but in reality it is a class where you start at high side and low side switches and then slowly work your way up to a Class-AB amplifier, which considering the components in it works pretty damn well. The class also has a pretty rough intro to Class D amplifiers, which is slowly being worked on by poor research assistants working at slave wages, and should be able to teach you how to build a very good Class D amplifier by the end of next December, I say this because I designed the Class D amplifier they are going to be implementing and it works pretty damn well if I do say myself.
http://www2.tec...courses/eet257/

If you want to get a lot more in depth in your knowledge of analog parts I recommend watching some lectures from the higher level class that this same professor teaches. The class is ECET368 and is titled Analog Integrated Circuits Applications. The place this class really excels IMO is the way it explains non-ideal characteristics of op-amps and how to deal with them.
http://www2.tec...courses/eet368/
The downside to this class's website is it is only updated to the current point in the curriculum, and there are no lecture notes available for future dates as of yet.

So if you hate reading and still want to learn some things I can't recommend these sites enough.

Edit:
For software I highly recommend you try and get a student or evaluation copy of Cadence OrCad, there is a student demo that is pretty easy to get at most schools and I believe there is an evaluation version. If you can't get OrCad then I would recommend National Instruments Multisim, it is decently powerful but OrCad has a lot more features.

For PCB layout my friends and I have all decided that the Allegro PCB designer that comes with the Cadence package is a complete POS so we all use EagleCAD now. It is a pretty robust and full featured program and it is very easy to pickup.
http://www.cadsoft.de/

[Edited by Cuw on 03-10-2009 at 02:02 AM.]