Best way to get a general electronics education.

[retrolefty]

Another thing that will teach you some practical electronics basics without too much preliminary math or physics is a Ham Radio class.  These are oriented to learning enough to pass the radio license exams...

Unfortunately in recent years the typical 'ham radio class' has morphed into just teaching the test for whatever class of licence you are going for. There is not longer a morse code test requirement for any class of licence. The 'official' FCC ham tests and the answers are now fully published and available to anyone, and there are several on-line exercise web sites that one can practice taking the actual test questions and see your score. Basically you can easily pass any ham test these days without learning anything other then memorizing the test questions. It's quite a change but I guess falling ham population lead to this to try and keep the hobby relevant for the times. That is not to say that some physical ham licence classes don't try and attempt to teach some basic electronics, but I would not advice taking that path unless you also want the ham FCC licence to get on the air.

Lefty

[oric_dan]

Anyway, my main concern was that they would dumb down the material.

This can be answered by checking out the textbooks for the CC courses, and see how
much maths is in there. You can expect the university-level courses will require a working
knowledge of calculus, rather than just algebra.

When you get to AC analysis, this involves transfer functions plus Fourier and Laplace
Transforms, so you need to know complex variables and integral calculus.

[westfw]

my main concern was that they would dumb down the material.

Dumbed down material is still useful.  You really don't want (or need) to all your electronics at the "physics" level.
I was ... annoyed ... when a lot of AC Analysis was based on phasors and Smith Charts; clever ways to avoid actually having to do real math.  (OTOH, it would be close to "black magic" if you hadn't learned calculus and complex variables and such.)  We never did much in the way of Fourier transforms, other than the basic concept of all periodic functions being expressible as sums of sinusoids...

[jackhall]

This is good to read that. You have mentioned all the courses about this. In this studies law's are so important to understands.

[oric_dan]

This is good to read that. You have mentioned all the courses about this. In this studies law's are so important to understands.

As people have mentioned, for just hooking up Arduinos you only need to know the basics,
like voltage, current, loading, grounding, Ohm's Law, a little bit about capacitors charging,
etc, but the OP expressed an interest in getting a real education, only he knows why :-).

[JoeN]

As people have mentioned, for just hooking up Arduinos you only need to know the basics,
like voltage, current, loading, grounding, Ohm's Law, a little bit about capacitors charging,
etc, but the OP expressed an interest in getting a real education, only he knows why :-).

Because knowledge is power.  Also, I am interested in high-speed circuits such as FPGAs and high speed ADCs and DACs and as soon as we are talking about crossing that threshold to analog all of the sudden I need to know more than how to count to one.  I didn't take those samples just to look at them longingly.

[oric_dan]

My favorite quote is, "A little knowledge is not so much dangerous as useless" - from
The Beast That God Forgot to Invent, by Jim Harrison.

Joe, for good measure, you'll also eventually want to add a digital signal processing
course to your repertoire.

Also, for reference, this is a truly great book on high-speed matter,

http://www.amazon.com/High-Speed-Digital-Design-Handbook/dp/0133957241