I started on these books (we of course called them the NEETS modules) when I was 19 in electronic warfare school, and they are the exact same books that my dad used when he was an 18 year-old sonar technician in training. As others have pointed out in the thread, these are targeted towards an audience of those with an aptitude for electronics, and are therefore meant to give them a practical understanding of how to work with complex military electronic systems. You'll see mentions of things like electricity flowing from positive to negative and more complex concepts reduced down to simpler ones.
The whole point is to get someone from knowing nothing about electronics to being able to troubleshoot a system down to an offending circuit card, and replace the part. There are more advanced schools, such as the journeyman technician school, which works on breaking down some of the wrong information they might have picked up on over the course of applying these practical concepts, and building up enough knowledge to troubleshoot down to the component-level. That course will get them through things like back-plane wiring, ohm'ing out bad pins on cables that run through the ship (and therefore are impossible to easily touch end-to-end), and sometimes even gets to desoldering individual components on cards and replacing them, in order to save on paying Raytheon $4000 for a card that cost them $1.50 to make.
With that in mind, almost no one that goes through these courses actually goes on to become an engineer, or really strives to understand the true nature of the forces that make their systems possible. For the most part, you can take these students and give them a broken system with hot-swappable components and the schematics for it, and they could fix it. To me, that's the true measure of success of these books.
The whole point is to get someone from knowing nothing about electronics to being able to troubleshoot a system down to an offending circuit card, and replace the part. There are more advanced schools, such as the journeyman technician school, which works on breaking down some of the wrong information they might have picked up on over the course of applying these practical concepts, and building up enough knowledge to troubleshoot down to the component-level. That course will get them through things like back-plane wiring, ohm'ing out bad pins on cables that run through the ship (and therefore are impossible to easily touch end-to-end), and sometimes even gets to desoldering individual components on cards and replacing them, in order to save on paying Raytheon $4000 for a card that cost them $1.50 to make.
With that in mind, almost no one that goes through these courses actually goes on to become an engineer, or really strives to understand the true nature of the forces that make their systems possible. For the most part, you can take these students and give them a broken system with hot-swappable components and the schematics for it, and they could fix it. To me, that's the true measure of success of these books.