[setquk]

I say this every time this is mentioned but Mimms actually did some brain damage to the budding electronics engineers. The books were cute but left people with a head full of things to be unlearned. This screwed up a number of my fellow students when they hit university. In fact our lecturer of the day, while drinking in the student union with us, described the Mimms books using language I can’t repeat here.

I actually started with 1st edition Art of Electronics Laboratory Manual back in the 1980s before I even went to university. That was in all incarnations total gold. It’s a tutorial guide rather than the textbook format of the main book.

In this day and age, Make Electronics (this will teach you which end of the soldering iron is hot) followed by TAOE is the way to go. Harry Kybett / Earl Boysen also produce an excellent book.

Electronics is vastly more complicated (and interesting) than cutting and pasting knowledge which is what you end up with from Mimms.

[sokoloff]

I found the Mimms 555/556 book to be a perfect source of copy/paste material to do the blinking lights “hello world” hardware equivalent.

Most programmers start off copy/pasting hello world; they don’t generally start off with accumulators and indirect addressing modes.