alt Hacker NewsHonestly, just pick up the Art of Electronics - Horowitz and Hill. Spend some time working through that book. By the end of it, you'll have a better grasp of electronics than 90% of the engineers I've worked with, all who are EE bachelors/majors. It's a 3 month job at most, less if you do a dedicated hour a night. Then pick up some breadboard and parts, and build to your hearts content.
Making a working circuit is honestly very easy once you know the basics. Look inside a Made in China knockoff appliance, and you'll see that most things can be made from a couple of conponents and a microcontroller. Pull apart an old TV remote or bluetooth device, and look up the part numbers and what they do. There's not much to it. You have to remember that most of the stuff getting designed and built in South East Asia is done by people with zero qualifications. Electronics being "the thing that smart university people do" in the West is mostly a mental block, culturally constructed because people don't want their kids getting electrocuted so bombard them with constant threat of death if playing with electricity (which mostly isn't a worry anymore unless you're working with mains power).
The true discipline of Electronic Engineering is designing something that works for every eventuality and environment, with close to 100% reliability, at the very cutting edge of what is possible with the components we can afford while balancing physical and financial constraints. That's something which takes years of both academic study and industrial experience.
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Note that AoE is not an academic book, more a book for tinkerers.
I'd recommend also to play with https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html
> Honestly, just pick up the Art of Electronics
I got this advice in 1998. I have the book. I found it useful for the "art" part. It got me through the projects that I was working on at the time, but personally it didn't help me with the fundamentals. Paraphrasing what has been said on this site many times in the past: AoE is a great first book in practical electronics if you already have an undergraduate degree in physics. I showed my brother AoE when he was building guitar pedals and he couldn't make sense of it and said it was obviously assuming things that he didn't know (he had no high-school science background).
There are a lot of potential and/or assumed pre-requistites even for basic electronics: high school physics, first-year calculus, maybe a differential equations course, certainly familiarity with complex numbers. As I understand it EEs take vector calculus and classical electromagnetism, that's a long road for self-study. For that reason it's hard to give general advice about where to begin.
For someone starting out I think the first things to study are DC and then AC analysis of passive circuits (networks of resistors, capacitors, inductors), starting with networks of resistors. Ohms Law, what current and voltage actually mean, some basic introduction to the physics passive components. This is the basics, and I don't see AoE getting anyone over this hump. This could be learnt in many ways, electronics technicians and amateur radio people know this stuff -- there are no doubt courses outside university both on line and in person. If we're talking books, get a second hand copy of Grob's "Basic Electronics." Once that's covered you can move on to semiconductors. I can recommend Malvino's "Electronic Principles," but this book won't teach you about resistors, capacitors and inductors. After that I think the Art of Electronics would be approachable. And also more specialised topics like digital design or operational amplifier circuits.
A book that usually gets a mention is Paul Scherz "Practical Electronics for Inventors." I got that book later, I personally found it a bit overwhelming with the mixture of really basic practical stuff combined with more advanced circuit theory, but it's no doubt popular for a reason.
Another standard recommendation is to buy one ARRL Handbook from each decade (I have 1988), the older ones have less advanced (hence more accessible) material. But reading the "Electronics Fundamentals" chapter is no substitute for Grob and Malvino.
there's a few youtube channels that are nice to watch to get you more interested in electronics, my two favourite are:
Bigclivedotcom (nice, basic fun) : https://www.youtube.com/@bigclivedotcom/videos
Mend it Mark (more advanced) :https://www.youtube.com/@MendItMark/videos
Personally I preferred Boylestad as well as Sedra & Smith.
Boylestad was an excellent first look at electronics with S&S being great for going in-depth on some topics.
I want to add that Moritz Klein's DIY synthesizer videos are top notch, especially for beginners in electronics. As somebody who is just working through AoE it feels like a great compliment and is very satisfying.
"Art of Electronics - Horowitz and Hill."
very good recommendation, that book help me turn my studies in to reality
electronic circuit emulators will help with the basics as well (eg https://www.falstad.com/circuit/)