[hospitalJail]

If I learned this way, it would have been off-putting.

So much nicer to grab an ardunio, motor, led, some sensors, etc...

Then graduate to esp8266/esp32.

But maybe I'm thinking embedded and my 2 years as an electrical engineer filled in some of the gaps when calculating things.

Eh, just my opinion.

[Cyberdog]

I agree that learning with an Arduino/Pi Pico is personally more fun and gets you to the stage of making something practical, or at least interesting, much more quickly. That said, doing things fully at the resistor and diode level still has its place, since someone has to understand stuff well enough at that level to design the Arduinos and Picos that the rest of us play with.

[linker3000]

If that's the route you want to take then that's absolutely fine.

That area of electronics is "modular digital electronics" and doesn't take you through the principles of basic passive components (resistors, capacitors, inductors) and then into analogue circuit theory and semiconductors, digital logic and so on.

The only thing that bugs me is when that approach is suggested as a response to 'how do I learn electronics' without any qualification or elaboration.

[hospitalJail]

Idk, I needed to understand resistors just to power an LED. As soon as you have any raw signal, you basically need a cap to smooth the signal.

I havent had a reason to use my own inductor myself, but obviously plenty of components have them.

Def has digital logic, registers are a clear example of this, especially if you are going to use an esp8266 which has only a few GPIO. There have also been cases when I needed to buy and/or/not gates, but they come as ICs with the caps inside for you.

I feel like making your own logic gates is reinventing the wheel(as the link that we are commenting on suggests). Even in school, doing EE, we only spent a blip on Assembly. I spent way more time doing higher level C/C++ stuff.