Learning Basic Electronics

What’s the best way to learn about electronics?

The internet presents us with a wide variety of free instructional material by way of YouTube videos, Blog posts, Tweets and Manufacturer’s application notes. An overwhelming amount of information indeed. We have curated and posted a selection of links to some of our favorite videos, blog posts and books to get you started with learning about electronics.

Videos

In the video below, Clive provides an accessible introduction to electronic components. Watched over 4.5 million times, this video has influenced and inspired many viewers.

Books

Quite possibly the best single authoritative text on electronic circuits, The Art of Electronics is an amazing reference book and the gold standard for anyone in the field. If you have room for only one electronics book on your bookshelf, this should be the one. It starts out with the basics of voltage, current and resistance and takes the reader through various circuits – analog and digital. There’s even a chapter on RF circuit elements.

Get this book today – it’s the best!

Blog Posts

In this blog post entitled “How a diode changed my life,” the author Onur Celebi talks about his childhood experience with education. He applies some basic ideas about the functioning of electronic components taught to him by his father to solve concrete problems.

In education, it’s important to strike a balance between what to show and what to let kids discover by themselves. He also notes that somehow there is less magic in playing with Arduino and Raspberry Pi than simple diodes. However today you can get a complete Electronics Starter kit (complete with diodes) to interface with an Arduino – best of both worlds!

Here are some other links to articles we discovered that educate the reader on very basic electronics

Basic Electronics Tutorial

How to read a schematic

Application Notes and Data sheets

Most component and test equipment manufacturers have libraries of data sheets and application notes. For instance, this application note from Coilcraft on Key Parameters for selecting RF Inductors provides an excellent overview of Inductor specifications such as Q factor and Self-resonant frequency. This article provides an overview of Capacitors. Data sheets contain a wealth of information on the associated products and their characteristics and specifications.

These are just a few ways to start on your electronics learning journey. Once you get comfortable with the basics, you can start building and experimenting with electronics, lighting LEDs, playing with sound and other exciting projects!