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I highly recommend the All About Circuits textbook: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/ It starts from the very basics and builds up to quite complex circuits and their workings. It's an all-round great website, too.
I recommend having a look at "Practical Electronics for Inventors" by Paul Scherz and Simon Monk. The book offers a very good introduction about the basics of electricity with many helpful illustrations, written in a down-to-earth style. In case you are interested in electronics, you will find that the book covers many intermediate/advanced topics such as operational amplifiers with lots of practical examples.
I highly recommend the All About Circuits textbook: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/ It starts from the very basics and builds up to quite complex circuits and their workings. It's an all-round great website, too.
[Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son (1922)]((https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23358380)). It explains electricity without any technical jargon. Pretty nice first read. His atomic model is outdated, but that doesn't seem to interfere with anything. After reading the first initial letters, you might have a greater motivation to dive into more complicated texts.
Walter Lewin's electromagnetism course from MIT [0]. These lectures completely transformed my understanding of physics. He mixes practical demonstration with a rigorous mathematical underpinning in a way that doesn't over simplify things. [0] https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyQSN7X0ro2314mKyUiOILa...
+1 for Walter Lewin's explanations. I also can't say enough about the clarity of explanations and examples in Feynman's Lectures [1] and the HyperPhysics [2] tutorials. [1] https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_toc.html [2] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/hframe.html
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_toc.html
I believe one can't appreciate the whole subject enough without knowing that the electromagnetic forces are how the atoms "work", also producing "chemistry" and everything we see.
To paraphrase Feynman, the electromagnetic forces also keep you from falling down through the floor.
For the start:
"If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied."
Before you try to understand electricity try to understand work and energy. Know the definition for a watt and what that means mechanically for example. For really basic things: maxewels equations, ohms law, and the idea that in a closed system potential and kinetic energy are constant. Just grab a university level physics book. V=IR (ohms law) gives you most of what you need for DC circuits. Remember that power is v…
I would stay away from Maxwell's equations unless doing something to which they're truly relevant (designing an antenna or something I guess, maybe building a rail gun if you're into that). Maybe I'm blinded by the years I spent as a computational electrodynamics researcher but the model is a little heavyweight for your standard hobby project. That said I really like your suggestion of starting with basic mechanics a…
Follow-up question: How do I safely experiment and play with my newfound amature electrical knowledge?
Follow-up question: How do I safely experiment and play with my newfound amature electrical knowledge?
Stay with low power. (Low tension and low intensity.)
Obviously I shouldn't plug my own creations directly into the wall. Is it safe to use a low voltage "power brick"? Will any do, or do I need an especially robust one just in case?