Post History

Creating a FAQ: how to read a datasheet

After reading various low quality questions Someplace Else today, it (once again) occurred to me that a whole lot of people, mostly hobbyists and engineering students, have no clue how to do the most basic thing of all: how to read a datasheet. 

Specifically, what the various parts such as absolute maximum ratings and electrical characteristics mean. What parameters to design after and which ones that are stress values. How to design with margins. How to quickly determine if a certain part is suitable for one's purpose and so on.

There's also lots of engineer jargon like analog/digital characteristics, ambient/junction temperature etc where the reader is expected to know what it means in advance.

I know of no reliable online resources that tell you have to read a datasheet, so I thought about creating a FAQ post about it here. The target audience should be electrical engineering students, not complete laymen. 

Ideally this would be some community-maintained project that many users can contribute to, but we don't have "community wiki" like SE.

**Question:** what is the best way to create a FAQ post like this here if I want multiple users to contribute and maintain the post? The "Papers" category don't quite seem to fit the bill(?).

I am also interested in feedback about what part that would be a good example datasheet. I was thinking about using the classic [LM317](https://www.ti.com/lit/gpn/LM317) LDO from TI as an example, since it's a common and reasonably complex product, but not overwhelmingly so. (And this post shouldn't need to get deep into the technical details.) The datasheet from TI is very good and detailed, containing everything one might expect to find in a generic datasheet, including some extras like lots of applications and layout advise.