Ever find errors in TAB books?

From: Matt J. McCullar (mccullar_at_flash.net)
Date: 08/03/04 

Date: Tue, 03 Aug 2004 00:43:35 GMT

TAB has published books for the aviation market and electronics hobby market
for many years. The electronics books are geared toward beginners and
intermediate users, for the most part. They've offered dozens of titles
over the years, offering a great variety of hobby projects. Some are rock
simple, others a bit more complicated.

One thing I've noticed about TAB books: while the text is almost always
quite good, I've never liked the extremely crude drawings they use in the
accompanying artwork. In artwork as complicated as an electronic schematic
diagram, it is very easy for an artist not knowledgeable about electronics
to inadvertently leave out a connection dot or two, or connect components
together that shouldn't be.

I'm now in my middle 30s and have tinkered with electronics since my early
teens. Looking back through my notes and copies of various books I've used
over the years, I can now see where I made some mistakes -- or was led down
the wrong path by incorrect information! I have enough experience today to
see a great many incorrect schematic diagrams in a lot of TAB's electronics
hobby books. I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed this.

My guess is, TAB scrimped on the schematics to hold costs down. But I
wonder how many people got burnt out on a potentially rewarding hobby
because they could not get a particular circuit to work, no matter how hard
they tried... not knowing that the schematic they were following was
sabotaged from the get-go! And this is not a magazine where you can read
the "Oops!" column next month, this is a book. You seldom see these updated
and corrected.

In particular, I remember how aggravated I was trying to get a program to
run on a Z-80 microprocessor circuit I built. I eventually was able to
figure how that the software program they listed (op-codes and hex
equivalents) was not only incorrect, but horribly wrong! In a program with
only a dozen lines, I counted three errors! I eventually managed to rewrite
the whole thing myself and get it to work. But I could easily have given
up. I wonder how many other hobbiests actually did.

Matt J. McCullar, KJ5BA
Arlington, TX

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