Shameless but possibly relevant plug... Here's my introduction to electronics series of tutorial videos: http://afrotechmods.com/tutorials/category/tutorials/beginne...

It's about an hour's worth of material and it is very concise.

Also here in Youtube playlist format: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gvJzrjwjds&list=PLzqS33DOPhJ...

Of interest this is the guy that developed American Fuzzy Lop[1], and the Guerrilla guide to CNC machining[2] (which is similarly well written).

[1] http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/

[2] http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/gcnc/

One thing that took me a long time to `get` was the concept of voltage is a bit miss-leading if you look up the definition even in the video of (http://afrotechmods.com/tutorials/2016/10/03/basic-electrici...).

Everyone wants to talk about the penitential energy and what-not. Though that is mostly pointless unless you grasp the first fundamental concept of voltage. Voltage is just simply the effort exerted by electromagnetic field on neighboring electrons.

As soon as you grasp that all definition of voltage relate to the real world of doing `work` eg... heating, moving then the concept of voltage of amps is a lot easier to understand.

This is awesome and great as a short-form resource. For years, my long-form (non-concise?) go-to book has been "The Art of Electronics" [0] by Paul Horowitz (and others depending on the edition). It has everything you need in a single reference book!

[0] http://amzn.to/2iZfjbG

Just skimmed but looks pretty comprehensive.

Another great reference is the Art of Electronics.

Tons a practical advice for selecting components and building circuits that is still relatively relevant even today.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9653898

I've been learning about basic circuit design recently and realized that I don't have any clue how things relate to the underlying electrodynamics. Does anyone have some good textbook recommendations that derive things like Ohm's law and concepts of capacitance, etc, from first principles?

This youtuber has some good videos with animations of visual analogies for analog electronics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4jzgqZu-4s

20,000 word document titled "Concise electronics for geeks". Excellent choice of title!

Also, this looks like a really awesome primer!

Another very good source of information is the US Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series (NEETS). https://maritime.org/doc/neets Also towards the end of the parent directory check the "Electronics Technician" volumes and other interesting stuff on welding, repairing etc.

Great review as an embedded SW guy to nourish my EE background. Nicely peppered with practical tricks and techniques that are useful in the field. I enjoyed seeing the low-pass and high-pass filtered wave signatures along with the explanation of what the problem might be (long/close connections and broken traces, respectively).

Nice, this looks really cool!

Although...it is going onto a 'read this soon' list, and I'm probably not alone in that. With these sorts of concise primer articles, have you considered providing a .pdf or .tex of the page?

From the article: "...consequently, several capacitors in series resemble one capacitor with a larger plate surface area."

s/series/parallel/ ??

A really good article.

too much wall of text and few images

Cheers Chris, cleared up the issue I had with potential difference didn't see it that way.

Those are two very different things (Ohm's Law and Capacitance).

Capacitance is basically the relation between electric field and charge, whereas inductance is the relation between magnetic fields and currents. Those follow from fundamental equations, if you want a calculus intensive derivation from the "first principles" of Maxwell's Laws. Someone on this thread mentioned Griffiths, which is a good text, it's what I used in E&M undergrad. Wangsness has a good E&M text too I liked.

Ohm's Law is a macroscopic statistical mechanical Law that happens in bulk.

It can be derived from even some of the simplest electron models (eg the very simplistic Druude Model). Where it can be shown that the current density through a chunk of material is proportional to the applied electric field. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drude_model

But it breaks down in smaller systems, where statistical averages don't hold (for example ballistic conductance in a nanowire). Or other systems when quantum mechanical effects will dominate (eg bandgap non-linearities of a PN Junction or Quantum Well, or how the bandgap of a semiconductor causes an increase of resistance at lower temperatures as opposed to decrease of resistance for metals).

I used to have a nice presentation of the latter on my old uni website called A Quick and Dirty Preview to Solid State Physics, but alas they disabled my old account after nearly a decade past graduatiOn. (Had to make the webpage for a class early in grad school, and it was linked by many other solid state physics classes interestingly).

Hyperphysics does a decent job of providing some insight: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/pplate.h...

The "first principles" part of E&M has some tricky math which can be mitigated by a well chosen problem domain. If you really want to dive into it, I hope you love (or learn to love) multi-variate calculus, linear algebra, and switching coordinate systems (cartesian, polar, spherical) multiple times to solve a problem.

I've only met one electrical engineer who ever knew about anything below the typical EE abstraction. Everyone still gets the job done without having a clue. It helps if you're doing RF design or very high frequency stuff and that's about it.

Ohm's law was not derived. It probably shouldn't be called a law either. Capacitance, etc. can be found in Introduction to Electrodynamics by Griffiths, which is a standard E&M college text.

I try to get into this at least a little bit in https://www.circuitlab.com/textbook/