Class II Books

[vakkotaur]

We need more Class II books. Lack of them is a failing in the information revolution. A failing not of the net and computers, but of books and printing presses.

This is about textbooks, or books that are of that nature. The kind of book a person turns to when they want to go from not knowing how to do something to knowing how to do something. I have my own way of classifying them. I suppose the classes could be given names. They'd be something like Children's, Average, and Expert.

As an example, suppose the subject was microwave radio circuits. (I figure you're probably not interested in microwave circuits, but this will get the idea across.)

Class I (Children's)
This book would show perhaps that microwaves are part of the spectrum beyond red light, that microwaves ovens can cook things, and you should be careful about what you put into a microwave oven.

Class II (Average)
This book would perhaps state in the first pages that there is the assumption you already know about non-microwave radio circuits, then go on to similarities and differences, before getting to the real meat of the subject. In the first chapters basic principles would be covered, and by the final chapter a reader who'd stuck with it would at least know what he was looking at if someone showed some microwave gear.

Of course, that's at the basic end of this class. There certainly would be more advanced texts that would go into greater detail about things just sort of glanced over by the more basic book.

Class III (Expert)
This book shows you the triple integral that needs to be solved to find the cavity size of the magnetron core you're designing. This occurs before page 10.

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All these classes of texts are useful. I have no problem with the existence of any of them. They are all necessary. But there's the gotchya, see. ALL are necessary. And it's the Class II stuff that's hard to find.

If you don't have access to a Class II book, you need to find that information elsewhere. The web seems a start, but it suffers from the same problem as outside the web: It's easy to find Class I sites, and you may see a few Class III sites, but you're lucky if you can find a Class II site. So you could take classes about the subject - if you have the time to spare, the money to spare, and can get to where they are being taught. Or you could try to find an expert who'd put up with what would be your apprenticeship while you learned.

It's fairly obvious that the most likely way a person could learn would be with the needed book.

I'm not looking for any specific Class II book just now, but I do recall looking for such things. And being frustrated at finding only Class I and Class III books. Without II, how does a person get from I to III? I wasn't even trying to get to III, actually, just get beyond I.

I do have an all too short list of books which I consider to be in Class II. Curiously, they mostly seem to date from the 1950s. I suppose this was before some changes in schooling happened. And likely there was an attitude that information was useful, and you had only yourself to blame if you did something stupid with it.

"Modern Chemistry" 1956(?) edition by Dulle, Brookes, & Metcalfe
This is an old text whose title is now ironic, but the principles have not changed, though there are a couple corkers (mainly how wonderful 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T are [mix them and you get something once named Agent Orange...]). Unlike most school taught chemistry now, the book goes with a 'descriptive chemistry' method. It goes through the families of elements and leaves the reader with a feel of how an element will likely behave. This is, I think, also a far more interesting way to learn chemistry, at least the beginnings of it, than how it is now usually taught. Chemistry isn't itself dull, the way it is taught nowadays is.

"Elements of Radio" Marcus & Marcus
This books starts out so simple you'd suspect it was a Class I book if you didn't look past the first chapter or two. It starts with looking at waves on a pond. However it builds, in nice small and easy to take steps, through all the main parts of a simple radio until you get to a simple 'crystal radio.' Once there, the parts are looked at again, to see how they can be improved. This book is not only telling how radio circuits work, but giving you a history of how they changed, as well as introducing and explaining electronic components. The only bad thing is that it is almost all tube radios. Transistors are barely mentioned, and integrated circuits were not even around when this book was printed.

"Basic Television" Grob
This assumes you know some of what can be learned from Elements of Radio and explains television (NTSC anyway), from the original black & white mono standard, through color, and even goes into how stereo sound could be done without breaking the standard. (The actual stereo implementation may differ, but not by much.)

"Amateur Telescope Making" (Book One) edited by Ingalls.
This book, in its original form, takes a bit of work to get information out of. It was somewhat a hodgepodge. Despite that, and its age (originally published in the 1920s), the needed information is there. Completing the set with ATM Book Two and ATM Book Three is nice and helpful but not essential. NOTE: Telescope and mirror making, and to an extent lens making, seem to be unusual. There are actually a good number of books that I would consider to be in Class II on the subject(s).

These are a very few, and they reflect some of my personal interests. I would like to know about any other Class II books, whatever the subject. Who knows, I might decide to do a bit of reading...

Comments

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

I know what ya mean. My personal frustration is with foreign languages. Even just learning how to pronounce the phonemes is a problem, 'cos the books I peek in at the library either have vague "Teach Yourself"-type descriptions like "it's like the uh in toaster but with tenser lips" (or worse, "no English equivalent; ask a native speaker"), or they're advanced Finer Points Of Grammar thingies that assume you know and don't provide a pronunciation guide. Bah!

So anyway, I happen to have a Class II book right here: Understanding Holography, by Michael Wenyon. It's a British book, but I bought it in Zürich when we lived in Switzerland in 1981, and I read it to pass the time on the train to Yugoslavia (which was still in one piece at the time, of course.) Using lots of diagrams and photos, it starts by explaining how lasers work, and the properties of laser light, and then describes interference patterns and how holograms are made from them. It even describes how to make your own holograms, and if I could afford all the necessary equipment, I could probably do so, using this book!

My dad, of course, being a nuclear physics professor, has many Class III books in his collection. (In fact, his job is why we were in Switzerland and Yugoslavia: he took a sabbatical from Rice University to work at the big nuclear lab in Switzerland that was called SIN at the time but is now called CERN. And he took a side trip to Yugoslavia to attend a physics conference in Zagreb.)