#101 overall
6.002 Circuits and Electronics
MIT OpenCourseWare
4 recommenders · 4 threads · recommended in 4 years, 2013–2026 · score 4.4
MIT's introductory circuits and electronics course for EE and EECS students, covering circuit analysis, transistors, amplifiers and digital logic basics. The OpenCourseWare version from 2007 includes lecture videos and readings, and an interactive MITx version also existed.
Commenters call the lecture videos very good and describe them as a godsend for learning circuit basics, with one pointing to the MITx version as super interactive.
Recommendations by year
20062026
Do you mean circuit theory or applied circuits?
No idea for purely circuit theory. My textbooks were not great, but videos from 6.002 (a course at MIT) were a godsend.
Sedra/Smith is my recommendation for applied circuits. It's mostly amplifiers---still with a heavy emphasis on theory. At 1400 pages, it's really, really long. (A good portion of this is also taught in 6.002.)
The Art of Electronics is a gold mine of knowledge but very, very in-depth/technical. By chapter 4, you're analyzing a precision waveform generator with 3 ICs, a MOSFET, and a handful of passive components for biasing/filtering. Horowitz/Hill even recommend specific components (lots of tables) with explanations, and they point out some common circuit mistakes, workarounds, and improvements. Also, it's over 1,000 pages just in the main book. If I had to pick one book as the sole resource for an EE degree, it's this one.
As a supplement to books: Falstad's circuit simulator[1] because it is very easy to use (compared to SPICE) and has examples of nearly every circuit you would learn as an undergrad.
[1] https://www.falstad.com/circuit/
I see some discussion of which books are good for people with various levels of electronics knowledge. I'd like to add one that I've never seen mentioned here: Agarwal and Lang's "Foundations of Analog and Digital Electronics".
This was the book used by MIT in 2007 for the first course in the EE and CS programs. It is that year's course that is on their Open Courseware platform [1], and the readings list there links to a full PDF of the book.
(Edit: click the book title on the readings page, not the "View e-book version" link. See my response to groos' comment below for details).
This is not a link to a pirated copy BTW. Agarwal is a pioneer in the open-education movement and the authors intentionally arranged for an open access PDF.
The lecture videos on Open Courseware are very good too.
[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-002-circuits-and-electronics-s...
If you like arduino, check out the teensy. It has a really good audio library and lots of example projects related to Audio. Like you can probably do an equalizer in software with it. It use the Arduino IDE and library so it should be pretty straightforward. Very reasonable prices for the hardware as well.
https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_Audio.html
That will be good for getting familiar. At some point if you want to design circuits you need to learn the circuit theory and math. Too many resources to mention but if I had to pick one I'd look at something like MIT Open Courseware EE classes on circuits and "systems and signals" For books Art of Electronics is the classic.
Speaking of EE educational material, for the basics this MIT OCW course[0] is really good. There's also an MITx version[1] that's super interactive and even features Gerald Sussman of SICP fame.
[0] - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
[1] - https://6002x.mitx.mit.edu/
Edit: I'm sorry, that EdX course doesn't seem to be the one I was thinking of. The cool website is https://www.tinkercad.com though. Definitely worth poking around and experimenting.
There’s a great (very low-level introductory) IoT course from Curtin University on EdX[1] that will teach you the absolute basics of circuitry and get you started building things with arduino. MIT also has almost all of their courses available for free (search “MIT OCW” or “MIT open courseware”) if you’re looking for something more technical, given your physics background. I believe their introductory circuits course for EE/EECS students is 6.002.
The EdX course is cool though because it uses a site (I wish I could remember the name) that simulates circuits to let you build things with an arduino right in your browser.
[1]https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-the-internet-of-t...