A free series of textbooks on the subjects of electricity and electronics. By Tony R. Kuphaldt. Six volumes in HTML, PDF and Adobe PostScript ( compressed ) formats. They say that necessity is the mother of invention. At least in the case of this book, that adage is true. As an industrial electronics instructor, I was forced to use a sub-standard textbook during my first year of teaching. My students were daily frustrated with the many typographical errors and obscure explanations in this book, having spent much time at home struggling to comprehend the material within. It was out of frustration that I compiled Lessons in Electric Circuits from notes and ideas I had been collecting for years. My primary goal was to put readable, high-quality information into the hands of my students, but a secondary goal was to make the book as affordable as possible. One of the best ways to learn how things work is to follow the inductive approach: to observe specific instances of things working and derive general conclusions from those observations. In science education, labwork is the traditionally accepted venue for this type of learning. Although electronic components are typically inexpensive, not everyone has the means or opportunity to set up a laboratory in their own homes. Although nothing is quite as good as building real circuits to gain knowledge in electronics, computer simulation is an excellent alternative. I discovered this when I started to learn a computer program called SPICE. It is a text-based piece of software intended to model circuits and provide analyses of voltage, current, frequency, etc. SPICE could be used within a textbook to present circuit simulations to allow students to "observe" the phenomena for themselves. SPICE is introduced in the book early on, and hopefully in a gentle enough way that it doesn't create confusion. For those wishing to learn more, a chapter in the Reference volume ( volume V ) contains an overview of SPICE with many example circuits.

>> Continue >>