Books
- Practical Electronics for Inventors
- Art of Electronics
- Electronics for Dummies (All-In-One, UK Edition)
- MAKE: Electronics
- The Manga Guide to Electricity
Websites
Websites about electronics abound! Here are some you’ll see me refer to frequently:
- SparkFun Tutorials
- Adafruit Tutorials
- United States Navy Electricity & Electronics Training Series (PDFs)
- All About Circuits
- Electronics Tutorials
- NYU’s ITP PhysComp Wiki
- For the fundamental physics: Physics Class Room
YouTube Channels
There are many very talented engineers posting video content about electronics online. Too many to list here. Carlyn has collected many videos into playlists. Of the playlists starting with simply “ItoE”, those have been about 60 to 80% watched by her as of January 2015. Please let her know if you have a favorite that is missing! The Learning Circuit series from Element 14 also has a huge catalog of videos.
Online Vendors
Check out Local vendors as well on our Local Resources page.
Super Beginner Friendly
Motor Specialists
Surplus
Big Guys
Huge Inventories, but can be tough for beginners:
Drawing Schematics
There is no one standard for recording schematics electronically. All of the following have strengths and weaknesses.
- offline: Fritzing
- offline: Eagle CAD
- offline: KiCad EDA
- cloud: http://www.digikey.com/schemeit/
- cloud: https://upverter.com/
- cloud: https://www.circuitlab.com/
Forums
Ideally the forums you use should be as specific to your interests as possible, like fashioningtech.com for wearables, civicforums.com for moding a Honda Civic, DIYDrones for UAV’s, etc. That said, here are some general forums to have as reference:
- http://forum.arduino.cc/ (friendly to beginners)
- https://www.evilmadscientist.com/forums/ (friendly to beginners)
- https://forum.sparkfun.com (friendly)
- https://forums.adafruit.com/ (friendly)
- http://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/ (friendly to beginners)
- https://www.physicsforums.com/ (friendly to beginners)