Lessons in Electric Circuits

Yes, the operation of cathode ray tubes is an area of physics where the analogy breaks and talking about particles is useful. Which is exactly what parent post said.

Literally all of regular circuit analysis does not obey this convention. I think maybe this post is pedantic more than is useful.

I've always struggled with electronics texts.

Mostly because, rightly I'm sure, they discuss the individual components, or subsystems common to electronics: what's a capacitor, what's a resistor, what's an oscillator, what's an amplifier.

But where they break down, for me, is they don't put it all together. It's like having your introduction to computers being nothing more than a book on data structures and algorithms.

All important, fundamental concepts, but how do you get from an algorithm and data structure book to writing your own Rogue game, which uses all of those things.

I've never found a book or other treatise that puts it all together, at least for me. Mind, I've never had any formal training. I took an electronics class in 9th grade which basically studied Ohms law and other fundamentals, and at the end I assembled an AM radio transmitter, but I had no idea how that transmitter worked, what choices were made and why, etc. It was just a kit, and more a testament of soldering and assembly skills than anything else. Same with all of those old Radio Shack kits that they used to sell.

I need a "design your own radio" course or something that works from the top down "here's a radio, here's the structure, here's how we work on each part of that, stitch them together, why use this transistor vs that one".

See my post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34340611

I hear you. I took many electronics classes over the years and never seemed to be able to build much intuition. I've often joked that 80% of my engineering training came from YouTube, and it seems to line up.

I found Ben Eater's 8-bit breadboard computer project[1]incredibly helpful in grokking both low-level computers and the electronic theory. https://eater.net/

I also highly recommend the channels bigclive [2], ave [3], eebvlog [4], Louis Rossman [5], and electroboom [6].

For podcasts, I've found The Amp Hour [7] and Embedded.fm [8] to be invaluable. There's also Contextual Electronics [9] if you want a more Udemy-style experience.

As a fun toy, I recently picked up Spintronics [10], which provides an excellent way to grok oscillators and transistors mechanically. If you're just looking to build intuition, this is a great place to start.

The best training I got, though, was sitting next to an EE as he troubleshot his own designs. Anything you can do to get in a room with electronics guys- meetups, conferences, HAM events, etc. is absolute gold.

Best of luck in your adventures pushing electrons around!

[1] https://eater.net

[2] https://www.youtube.com/@bigclivedotcom

[3] https://www.youtube.com/@arduinoversusevil2025

[4] https://www.eevblog.com/

[5] https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup

[6] https://www.youtube.com/electroboom

[7] https://theamphour.com/

[8] https://embedded.fm/

[9] https://contextualelectronics.com/

[10] https://upperstory.com/spintronics/

I wish I had these resources when I was in school. I was studying EE back in the late '80s. I had a textbook with maybe two worked out examples for each concept. The answers to the odd-numbered homework problems were in the back, but just as a number. So if I worked out a long problem and got, say, 5 as an answer, and the answer in the back was, say, -5, I had no real way of knowing if I made a mistake somewhere, or if the answer in the back of the book was incorrect. Working in groups was discouraged as a kind of cheating because you were supposed to do your own work. The professors weren't that interested in teaching because they felt they were there more to rank us. And the teaching assistants were mostly foreign-born with limited spoken English skills.