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Comment by compumike | Hacker News Reader

This is mostly solvable. I recently deployed lazy loading for schematic images on https://ultimateelectronicsbook.com/ and configured IntersectionObserver (with polyfill) to have a rootMargin equal to 3*window.innerHeight (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Intersectio...). Under most reading and even fast-scrolling conditions, the image will be loaded well before it is scrolled into view.

But I will agree with the sentiment -- I find it incredibly annoying on pages that do lazy loading and don't implement this enlarged intersection check to make it appear seamless.

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Nice website! Some unsolicited advice: Just looking at the switches page of your website, most images are around 100 kb despite being visually fairly simple. Naively saving one as an indexed PNG image resulted in no visual changes but reduced the size by a factor of roughly 2. I would recommend optimizing your images in addition to what you're already doing if loading time is important. SVG probably would do even better, but I don't know how you're making the images, so I don't know how much work that would be.

Anyone know any books that go the opposite order? Start with interesting working projects, add in the theory as needed to adjust the projects.

To learn photography I'd prefer starting with a camera. Not withe theory of light or the properties of atoms that allow glass to be transparent or how lenses are ground.

Similarly, if possible, to learn electronics i'd like to start at a higher level and work down rather than bottom up.

Interesting, as I'm exactly the opposite.

Are there names for these two types of teaching/learning approaches? Is one "better" than the other?

"Bottom-up" vs "top-down" is the general name for the two approaches, although they're not specific to learning (also e.g. to project planning).

Edit: Actually I'm not sure that's really right, even example-led approaches are usually bottom up. For example, an example-led approach to programming would start with "hello world" and work up from there, leaving a full-blown example project (if there is one) to the end.

Completely non-ironically, I prefer a middle-out approach. I like to dive in past the "beginner" stage immediately, and go from there. If I feel like I need to go back and learn the basics, I can do so on a need-to-know basis.

Your book looks really great, how does it compare with the classic AoE?

Wow, thank you! I think Art of Electronics reads well for people who already have some theory and are ready for a more practical guide. Currently, I'm aiming to build in just a bit more theory/math/background than that, so it can be usable for an undergrad college course, for example. I think AoE really lives up to the "Art" part of the title, and that's probably why it's so beloved.

> equal to 3*window.innerHeight

So basically is regular loading.

Not on long pages with little scrolling.

Looks like the perfect use case for infinite scrolling.

> Click here to see more pictures

Your book looks like a potentially great resource for teaching electronics to music tech students. I will follow your progress! Thank you for sharing.

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