Since there's no immediate explanation I imagine someone will click through to the comments to find one. This really should be at the top of the linked-to page (if the author is present to see this comment).

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The Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series (NEETS) was developed for use by personnel in many electrical- and electronic-related Navy ratings. Written by, and with the advice of, senior technicians in these ratings, this series provides beginners with fundamental electrical and electronic concepts through self-study. The presentation of this series is not oriented to any specific rating structure, but is divided into modules containing related information organized into traditional paths of instruction.

The series is designed to give small amounts of information that can be easily digested before advancing further into the more complex material. For a student just becoming acquainted with electricity or electronics, it is highly recommended that the modules be studied in their suggested sequence. While there is a listing of NEETS by module title, the following brief descriptions give a quick overview of how the individual modules flow together.

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Slightly larger Module descriptions can be found here: https://gist.github.com/4053057 (didn't want to pollute commentspace by pasting it all here)

A friend of mine gave me a dog eared copy of the Navy electronics training manual when I was in high school and it was fabulous. Here was a book written to approach the largest audience with a variable set of backgrounds. It helped me pass my Novice exam and later much of the stuff I just "knew" confounded my fellow students while pursuing my EE degree. Nice to find these updated versions although the motors & generators section is much as I remember it.

This is exactly the type of education experience we should be optimizing as a society: self-study, in-depth, yet practical material geared toward leaving the student able to perform some service of value in the world.

I'm a huge fan of a broad liberal education, but many educational institutions have lost the plot. When a free PDF on the web can double your salary ability and a 50K education from the local university will leave you only in debt? The feedback loop for higher education is broken.

I'd love to see this integrated into something with more video material. In fact, if I had money for philanthropy, putting together a job-oriented free electronics course would be near the top of my list of things to do.

Side note: there are instructions for sending completed training material to the Navy to have them grade it. I wonder how many packages the Navy gets from students all over the world consuming this material and looking for a grade?

Thanks! I've been slowly teaching myself electronics for the past few years (as a hobby). I recently got an oscilloscope and it opened a whole new world for me!

I'd also suggest the following playlist on YouTube. The army/navy/air force videos are amazing! http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAA9B0175C3E15B47

http://www.Allaboutcircuits.com is also a pretty good site with videos and a very active forum.

I am doing the same thing. Any tips for cool things to do with the oscilloscope?

I cut one of the ear buds from an old pair of headphones. Connected it to the scope and got a cool visualization of the music being played.

Beyond that, the biggest benefit of the Oscilloscope was it let me learn about and build oscillators and op-amps. For instance, I made a relaxation oscillator a few days ago (produces low frequency square waves).

I recently also got two electronics learning lab. I got the 300-in-1 from Elenco. Radioshack also has a similar one. The material that comes with the lab is strange - on the one hand, the projects are pretty sophisticated. On the other, there is little to no explanation on how they work. But I've found that this is great for self-study. The oscilloscope has been very handy for this part.

P.S.1 Someone showed me a cool trick with an oscilloscope at maker faire. You need two signals out of phase. Go into X-Y mode and voila ... you get some cool annimated drawings :)

P.S.2 Be careful and safe playing with electricity!

Having a term to google may help others: it's called a Lissajous Figure

Thanks this is an excellent side dish!

I'm on my phone so typing is a little bothersome, but if this is the same as the printed manuals they've had for years I would highly recommend it. Most of my study on electronics outside of hands on work was with this series. If you're thinking of taking 6.002x on edX these might help out a lot as a primer for those who might otherwise be jumping in blind.

My brain immediately parse the acronym as Not in Education, Employment or Training(NEET) before I read the rest of the title.

Thanks for posting this. Not only does it appear to be an excellent resource, but downloading all of the PDFs finally gave me a reason to try out curl.

I used this small Python program to download the entire set of PDFs:

  import urllib
  for i in range(14173, 14197):
      url = "http://jacquesricher.com/NEETS/%d.pdf" % i
      print url
      urllib.urlretrieve(url, "%d.pdf" % i)

With curl:

  curl -O 'http://jacquesricher.com/NEETS/[14173-14196].pdf'

Here's a way to do 4 downloads in parallel:

  for ((i=14173; i<14197; i++)); do
    echo http://jacquesricher.com/NEETS/$i.pdf
  done | xargs -n 1 -P 4 curl -O

Another trick for parallel execution is to generate a makefile then use make -j.

I was the electrical officer on a Navy ship. Since my undergraduate degree was in physics, I thought it was incredible that my guys were learning this stuff. Glad to see it's made it to the Internet.

I went to school in San Diego where there are a lot of former sailors. The former Navy tech guys always dominated in my EE classes after learning from these materials.

Interesting to see these posted on HN. I studied NEETS modules while working on radar and weapon systems electronics as Data System Technician in the Navy (DS). They cover a lot of ground and most teach things in a pretty simple way (as the often need to train people who weren't the most academically successful). They are a bit dry, though.

I almost joined the Navy's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Power_School . Back then it seemed like it would be really technically challenging but I chickened out at the last moment. :( oh well. Given how my life has gone so far maybe it would have been a good option.

It seems like this NEETS training would have also been neat. Thanks for this link. The nuclear school material is SECRET, so I won't expect to find it, lol. :)

Here's a quote from the introduction:

"If there are roots to western science, they no doubt lie under the rubble that was once ancient Greece. With the exception of the Greeks, ancient people had little interest in the structure of materials. [...] Recent experiments have revealed that there are, indeed, several basic particles, or building blocks within all substances."

The document doesn't read like a usual textbook, it feels lighter though maybe a little less rigorous. Interesting read nonetheless!

This is great. Thanks for posting. Much less rambling than the art of electronics!