I feel very fortunate to work with such a great group of people here at Maker Media. Every day it seems like there’s some new and exciting project on the horizon. A few months ago, Gareth Branwyn, a senior editor at MAKE, and an editor at Make: Books, asked me to check out a new title he was developing with author Charles Platt. The book was called Make: Electronics, and from the moment I started reading the rough draft, I was completely hooked.
Now that the book is out, I thought it’d be fun to ask Charles and Gareth some questions about the book and share their answers here on Make: Online. First, I asked Gareth a few questions about how the book came into being. Then, keep reading to find out what Charles’ first electronics project was and why all of the telephone engineers in England are happy he stopped messing around with “their” equipment!
How did Make: Electronics come about?
Gareth: When I came onboard as an editor for Make: Books, in 2007, we were sitting around brainstorming ideas for books. We started in on our new Illustrated Guide series. We’d just published The Illustrated Guide to Astronomical Wonders and were working on The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments. We were tossing out all sorts of crazy “Illustrated Guide to…” ideas and somebody said “The Illustrated Guide to Electronics.” It hit me (and I think all of us) like an eastbound bus — how about a beginner’s guide to electronics that could appeal to the growing community of MAKE readers who really wanted to learn electronics but who are not engineering/tech-minded — true beginners — a book that had the same sort of “hey, I can do this!” look, feel, and plain-spoken writing style as MAKE magazine itself. Not part of the Illustrated Guide series, but a special, stand-alone title.
I thought about Forrest Mims’ Getting Started in Electronics and how I meet people all the time who do venerating bows whenever that book comes up. ’cause that’s how they go their start. That was MY first significant electronics book, too. We could create the Getting Started in Electronics for the early 21st century! We could create a book that, several decades from now, self-made electrical engineers and career-makers might speak in awe and hushed-tones when OUR book was mentioned.
So, this became the organizing principle for the book. We started thinking about authors. We were tossing around different ideas in the ensuing months. And then Mark Frauenfelder mentioned Charles, after I’d seen the “Home Electronics” section of MAKE, Volume 10, and the amazing job he’d done there, introducing home electronics and showing several 555 projects. He seemed like the perfect candidate. Luckily, he was up to the challenge.
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