Learn electronics by practice

I miss electronics retail, even with its issues. Radio Shack had the Forrest Mims engineer's notebooks for learning electronics, and it was great to be able to drive down to a Fry's to pick up a component that you needed in a hurry on a weekend.

Shout out to Anchor Electronics in Santa Clara, San Mateo Electronics Supply, and of course Jameco, which are still alive.

I'm also lamenting the loss of SF Bay area electronics surplus: Weird Stuff, Halted/HSC, and the latest casualty, Excess Solutions. Is there any place left around here to find used/surplus electronics?

Is what this website teaches useful in the real world? What I mean is - is there a demand for people who know digital electronics or is it mainly for people who are curious how chips work?

I no longer have the textbooks obviously, but it was just a regular gymnasium in a provincial town (Leeuwarden), we were using the standard government recommended VWO textbooks too, just under 20 years ago. I'm pretty sure it was in the textbook because the teacher was not the type to go off book and teach us something not needed for the tests.

We had those electronics circuit practice boards and you could hook multiple up together to make a half adder.

A group of students that were acing the tests and finishing their homework were spending a couple weeks of time in the back of the class assembling a full adder out of literally all of the practice boards the school owned. I wasn't acing any tests and wasn't finishing my homework on time but I joined them anyway because it was more fun. My contribution was realizing that we could use the relais as and and gates, doubling our resources enabling the completion of the full adder.

I'd recommend the book "Practical Electronics for Inventors". For me it had the right balance between not making too many assumptions but still teaching interesting circuits.

I would say no, unless that is the kind of stuff you are specifically interested in.

You will probably never see a full adder chip outside of retro and tinkerer stuff. If there are commercial uses left, they might be gone and replaced by FPGAs soon.

If someone asked me to teach them the more modern way, more appropriate for someone who wants to make props or puzzles and stuff as opposed the more retro experimental stuff, I'd advise a bit differently.

I would probably tell them to start with an ESP32 powered Arduino module, and some op amps, because op amps are both easy to understand and practical.

And at the same time, brush up on your pure mathematics side stuff, if you don't want to be like me, not really able to do any of the super high end stuff.

At the basic level you won't even need algebra, as you do more advanced work the math gets heavier.

Before even touching a real circuit, go immediately to the Falstad Simulator, and check out their example circuits. No, it's not perfectly accurate, but it is an amazing tool and runs right in a browser.

I think there's a lot of stuff that is kind of cool to try out for educational purposes that might be best just left in the simulator, at least at first, so you don't have to buy a bunch of stuff just to try out, and then not know what to do.

Probably don't buy a name brand soldering iron, a Pinecil V2 is probably about what you want, or a random T12 station.

The current good cheap multimeter changes every week it seems, the no name stuff is always changing, IIRC right now it's the HT118 or something that a lot of people like, but I could be wrong.

Oh, and don't invent a brand new standard and decide you're going to make all your stuff compatible with it, make up a bunch of custom cables, etc. There's a high risk of being bored, or finding some new universal standard for everything, and winding up with piles of useless junk.

Just buy the parts you need for one project at a time. USB-C and barrel jacks are good. Don't use too many weird connector types, because cables take up so much space and are a really annoying kind of junk to have around.

Wagos and premade pigtails are your friend for making up adapters.

Learn the E3 resistor and capacitor values, see if you can keep to mostly just those, if you want to reduce the number of different parts you need.

Most intro tutorials don't cover a lot of this stuff I wish I had known....