What is your best method or place to learn electronics?

I think most people learn best by doing.

I have run the full gambit of hands on work then advancing into advanced ideas and finally extreme research ideas.

I am now much more able to describe how and why things work where in the beginning I could only explain how to make things work.

Getting the full picture from top to bottom is very enlightening.

DAB

Mine started with college, and has been evolving since. I feel the best way to start, is to pick some sort interesting to you project. With the modern internet, resources can be found.

I attended a 2 year college myself. It was a Bell and Howell shool.

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Hi DAB

I attended a vo tech school for diesel mech back in high school. Not sure if this is the same type of school that you attended but your comment reminded me of those days. I really enjoyed working on the caterpillar machines. The experience has come in handy more than once.

When cold starting a bus thats been sitting in the desert for a few years, be sure to pick up some new batteries and oil before driving there. Swap out the batteries and oil, bleed the fuel lines while turning over and the motor will likely start with no issue (there will be a big plume of black smoke coming out of the tailpipe for a few moments)

It was a great program. Most of the trades offered at the school were in cooperation with local businesses to offer apprenticeships  to the students.

Thanks for the nostalgia.

I was going to vote but then realized I couldn't choose just one. Books, YouTube, participating in communities, and learning by doing are all great in my opinion.

I am 100% learn by example kind of guy. I always tell those whom ask me how to learn to program to find something they want to do and DO IT!!!

I usually suggest a simple calculator than build onto it and make it more advanced.. now looking things up and getting help from communities is still great but I feel nothing can replace that dive-right-in feeling.

Alexios Anagnou

Aviation Electronics Engineering

Electronics is one thing and everything. After the education in a school , you know everything and nothing. You know only theories . Electronics is all around. You have got to have a specialty. You can be specialized to one or two or three things ...and this can be done into the training school of the Company you work for and on the work. There is no other way.

I was fortunate to have a career in electronics.

This was not specialised so I have a broader and perhaps less detailed experience.

I chose other because there were multiple selections which included some courses but more books, theories and doing stuff.

Obviously things have changed over my time in electronics, and new techniques have had to be learnt.

I keep telling the pupils we introduce to electronics that you never stop learning.

As rachaelp said there is a difference between learning and understanding.

I find the best way to understand is to have a project, and then you tend to get forced into learning more than you would.

While videos might be able to provide useful information, it is rather hard to use them as reference material, or skim read them.

Hence I don't really use them as a learning resource.

Cheers

Mark

Looking back over the last 8 years of my interest in mech electronics, I found that inspiration has come from YouTube - mainly the Ben Heck show. 

I just realized that my actual learning is typically a side effect of trying to beat a personal challenge.  In the quest to do so, I often turn to a google search on the current thing I'm trying to do.  I buy the parts and then bread board it.

Funny, even though my son and I spend a lot of time producing how-to videos, I personally don't learn that way.  I prefer quickly skimming a blog or Instructable for just what I'm looking for.

Here's my unintentional ways of solving design challenges:

• Often when I web search, I bump into an Instructable on the topic that gives me what I need.  That's pretty much how I learned to use the ESP8266, for example.
• For Arduino, I typically start with example code for what I'm trying and cobble code from there.
• For the trinket, I used the Adafruit site's startup guides.
• I won't mention their name, but one of your competitors has a Google search result on the first page on how to use Eagle to build a PCB.  That taught me how to build a PCB.
• When I hit a very specific road block, I do a Google search and find that someone asked it in some stray forum somewhere in the world.
• For trickey circuits (to me) such as power latches and H bridges, I google search and typically find some stray blog on the topic.
• When it comes to learning software to enable my projects, YouTube tutorials are definitely what have taught me (Blender, Autodesk Fusion, KiCad)

-Sean

Alexios Anagnou

Aviation Electronics Engineering

Electronics is one thing and everything. After the education in a school , you know everything and nothing. You know only theories . Electronics is all around. You have got to have a specialty. You can be specialized to one or two or three things ...and this can be done into the training school of the Company you work for and on the work. There is no other way.