The elegance of vendor tutorials

Fourteen years ago, I wrote a blog post that celebrated catalogs as useful educational materials. It was brief, and some of the links might not work anymore, but the concept remains sound.

I teach at one of the top engineering schools in the world, and I spend a lot of time looking at textbooks, designing courses, and crafting narratives to convey concepts, intuitions, and insights with students. It is not easy, and I have deep respect for people who take the craft seriously and find ways to share the fascinating things that we work on.

In this post, I want to highlight this idea again– how vendor materials can be very practical learning resources. I use the Thorlabs web site in one of my courses– in fact, one of my homework assignments is to stock a Thorlabs shopping cart with the items needed to replicate an optical system we discuss in class. Full disclosure: Thorlabs has never paid me a dime (but I would probably cash the check if they sent one).

Just today I came across Edmund Optics’ application note on ultrafast lasers and it is hands down the most accessible, pithy description I’ve ever come across.

Why is this? Why are vendors so efficient and effective at generating this sort of tutorial information? Perhaps it is because they are constantly interacting with customers that have small gaps in their understandings. The customers are sophisticated, but they might not quite understand the engineering trade-offs in a particular device. Vendors are constantly educating their customers– on how to select items, how to use them, and what sort of trade-offs are fundamental to the technology they’re working with. Maybe this is only part of the reason. Regardless, I am grateful. Both as a user, and as an educator.