Make Electronics

What Next? 233

Reference Sources

Reference Sources

Online

My favorite educational and reference site is Doctronics (http://www.doctronics.
co.uk). I like the way they draw their schematics, and I like the way they include
many illustrations of circuits on breadboards (which most sites don’t bother to
do). They also sell kits, if you’re willing to pay and wait for shipping from the UK.
Part of a page from the doctronics website is reproduced in Figure 5-8.

Figure 5-8. A sample page from http://www.doctronics.co.uk shows their detailed instruc-
tional approach. This is a valuable free online resource.

My next favorite hobby site is also British-based: the Electronics Club (http://
http://www.kpsec.freeuk.com)..) It’s not as comprehensive as Doctronics, but very
friendly and easy to understand.

For a more theory-based approach, try http://www.electronics-tutorials.ws. This
will go a little farther than the theory sections I’ve included here.

For an idiosyncratic selection of electronics topics, try Don Lancaster’s Guru’s
Lair (http://www.tinaja.com). Lancaster wrote The TTL Cookbook more than 30
years ago, which opened up electronics to at least two generations of hob-
byists and experimenters. He knows what he’s talking about, and isn’t afraid
of getting into some fairly ambitious areas such as writing his own PostScript
drivers and creating his own serial-port connections. You’ll find a lot of ideas
there.