Comment by dotancohen
4 years ago
Very, very nice. Right from the beginning:
> At a fundamental level, electronics is the branch of physics in charge of controlling the flow of charged particles, typically electrons. In practice, electronic engineering uses the highest level manifestations of said flow of charge to provide solutions to problems or needs.
I absolutely love reading text that state what we already feel intuitively and present it as an eloquent statement of fact.
"...branch of physics in charge of... charge"?
I'm not sure who or what the site is for. If you need a one-para explanation of what you can do with electronics - it doesn't really provide that, because it doesn't provide product examples.
If you want a usable introduction to circuit theory - it doesn't provide that either. (Explaining what a transistor does is "beyond the scope of this text"? OK.)
If you want to know how a modern phone works (which is literally all of EE except power electronics in a small portable device) - there's nothing about RF, comms theory and encoding, error correction, and so on.
So what exactly is this supposed to teach readers?
It looks suspiciously like what's sometimes called Cargo Cult writing - the reproduction of ideas from other texts without fundamental insight into the topic or reader needs.
The main point seems to be to promote the author(s) as an authority, but unfortunately if you want to be authoritative it takes a bit more insight and effort than this. (See also - Horowitz and Hill, for example.)
As another poster put it: it’s an introductory overview just to give the reader a quick perspective on what I the topic is about, like an encyclopedia description.
I would expect a 12 year old to get something out of it, or an author who knew no physics but wanted to put a bit of electronics into their mystery novel.
There is an important place for overviews such as this.
I too love conciseness in scientific texts.
Were it 90% of tutorials or blog posts nowadays and it would take 5 or 10x as much space to say the same thing, detours and forced jokes and analogies included, in the process making it less understandable.