During my time at the university I took lots of CS courses but did not learn much about electronics. I don’t know very well how a motherboard functions, for example. As I can’t go back to university to study electronics, I want to learn it by myself. Where should I start?
I’ve used a few texts, but one of the best is still Horowitz and Hill’s The Art of Electronics. The book not only explains things clearly, it has “counterexamples” to show you why some circuits won’t work
Are you trying to learn about motherboards or about electronics?
There’s about 10 levels of abstraction and a jillion man-hours of expertise and experience between them.
Understanding what a capacitor and a transistor are is about as useful to motherboard-level comprehension as understanding what carbon and oxygen are is useful to understanding the common cold.
Fill us in on your actual goals and curiosities and we can probably point you at appropriate resources. You probably don’t really want to start from first principles of electromagnetism unless you’re prepared to spend 2 or 3years before you get the chip level.
I “do” electronics for a living. And I am not sure I can give you a good answer to your question. Much of it depends on precisely what you want to do, and your style of learning.
The Art of Electronics is a good book, but it’s not my favorite. I have actually learned more from books written by Bob Pease and Jim Williams.
I love this pic of Jim Williams in his home lab. 
I liked Radio Shack - Basic Electronics as a simple introduction. I’m by no means a electronic wizard, but I’ve been able to build some small things, like a one bus, three channel audio mixer fer instance (the EQ was hell for me). I’d say get a nice breadboard, think of a simple project, find components and try to figure it out step by step. Remember, if you go by a manual or guide, to try to figure out why, not only how. If it works out, move along to the next project, or tweak the existing one.
Definitely would recommend picking up one of (or both) of the books mentioned here. I’m an ME but I can do fairly basic circuits.
unfortunately, that’s not going to go very far in helping you understand what’s going on in e.g. your computer’s motherboard. Most of the stuff which does anything remotely interesting is a very highly integrated circuit (chip) with millions or even billions of transistors too small to see. so as far as I’m concerned modern computer chips are magic squares which take in electricity and output Fallout 4.
Here’s the book, btw: Radio Shack Basic Electronics (Share Me) (Self Help Ebook Pdf)(1) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Hope it helps. Most important is to have fun, I think.
The Teaching Company has a course on Electronics. Pretty good. The first few lessons start with basic components like resistors, capacitors, and such, and later courses will (I see) go into digital circuits. No heavy duty math. I started in on it, then got waylaid by other projects, but I truly do intend to get back to it when I can.
I’m reading a very interesting book called Code. It starts with the idea that you might want to communicate with a next-door neighbor with flashing lights, then introduces Morse code, braille, encoding text (and other things) as numbers, number systems, electrical relays, logic gates, adders, memory, digital logic, machine language, and more.
It’s all stuff I knew in one form or another, but it’s interesting to see one book put it all together and cover so much ground.
Lots of basics on Youtube as well. I’ve looked at a few videos from Afrotechmods and found them informative (hey, it’s been 35 years since I took Microelectronics, don’t judge!)
I echo the thoughts of those who are asking what you mean by “electronics,” what you want to learn, and what you want to be able to do with that knowledge.
I have built three computers and I don’t know shit about electronics.
I was a EE major my first two years of college, but the only EE course I took was basic circuit analysis. This taught how voltage, current, and resistance worked; components like resistors, diodes, and capacitors; Kirchoff’s current law; and labs on transistor analysis. So I know the very basics about circuits but cannot design a circuit that would do anything useful (although in 1982 I made a device that sounded a beep if my car was turned off, the lights were on, and I opened the door).
I ended up a CS major and have taken both undergrad and graduate courses in computer architecture. I learned all about the logic of how a carry-lookahead half adder works. And I still don’t know shit about electronics.
You don’t have to know about electronics to know all about how to work with motherboards. A motherboard is really just a pile of components with a way to connect them and interface them to the outside world. Each of those components has its own subcomponents and by the time you get down to “electronics” you are getting into some complex stuff.
You can read a pinout diagram for a component without knowing about electronics. I once diagnosed and replaced a dead power supply by walking through troubleshooting steps that require no actual knowledge of electronics.
Not hard to learn to build a computer from parts. Very hard to learn how to design one from scratch–years of full-time study.
Yeah. Echoing the above, you need to realize that a motherboard is to simple circuits on a breadboard as a business jet is to a glider. A modern motherboard, routed for ghz level memory lines with the DC-DC converters and dozens of integrated chips is complicated. It’s also not a product you could feasibly design as a single electrical engineer, you need a team to do it. Well, you could, but it probably would take you 10+ years.
There are all kinds of neato simple gadgets you can build using arduinos and breadboards. The question really should be : what are your goals? Do you want to make a living doing it? Well, as far as I know, you need a university degree in the subject, or employers won’t hire you. And that’s a whole topic in itself.
Do you want a basic understanding of what is going on with a motherboard? Different story.
It’s been 4 days since the OP and he hasn’t logged on since. IMO it’s gonna be a while before we get an update. If this falls off the front page meanwhile we may never.
I’ve wondered if a Modern day Steve Wozniak could design a motherboard in his garage?
Steve had an incredible understanding of design. Just for fun he built his own Pong game, designed a box for phone phreaking. Designed the first Apple.
I’ve wondered what he’s building today just for fun.
I am really sorry about the late reply. It has been hectic times for me as I am moving my house.
I am more into the motherboards. I’d love to have the expertise and knowledge of those guys who makes reviews on power supply units or motherboards.
He couldn’t. The motherboards that were possible in the late 70s are a tiny fraction of the complexity of modern systems. A motherboard is just about the most complex circuit board that is mass produced.
Here is my recommendation. It is pretty strong on power supplies as well as digital electronics. It tries to teach practical techniques rather than theory. Learn by doing. Very well illustrated as you might expect from Makers.