Just a thought for you guys that often come up with questions about how various things work in electronics:
I recommend that you subscribe to a magazine such as “Nuts & Volts” or “Everyday Practical Electronics”. The latter is very similar to N&V, but comes from Britain. You can save a bit of money by doing an online subscription and downloading your issues as PDF files.
I subscribe to both N&V and EPE, plus Servo Magazine.
N&V has recently been running a worthwhile series about logic families (i.e. 7400-series TTL, CMOS, etc.) and how to use them.
It seems like every issue has at least one article that involves PIC MPUs, and there is a column called “Getting Started with PICs”.
One down-side of these magazines is that the editing is not like it was in “the old days”. For example, the latest N&V has a project article for building a sine/square/triangle signal generator. The text has about a zillion technical errors in it, plus the design of the circuit is just not very good. I don’t think the auther really knows what he’s doing. I think the old “Popular Electronics” magazine would never have printed such a lousy article.
But overall, something like N&V is a great investment if you want to learn about electronics.
Pete