I started with EEVBlog, especially "Fundamentals Friday" and the series where he designs things. Next, I turned to the textbook at AllAboutCircuits.
Next thing I did was design and build a DC lab. I bought my meters and scopes outright, but designed and built my own DC load and power supply. Since I'd already watched Dave's videos about them on EEVBlog, they were obviously influenced by his design, but I made a couple of non-trivial changes to the spec so that I'd have to make my own design decisions. I found this electronics stackexchange post very helpful for heat dissipation calculations [0]. Also, while it's very simple and not suitable for complex or precise work, Falstad's circuit simulator was very helpful for experimenting [1].
My next step was fixing things. This gave me an opportunity to do a bunch of things:
* Become familiar with ICs. At first I always had to look up the number on every IC I saw to figure out how it was supposed to behave before I could test if its actual behavior matched, but over time you'll start recognizing those numbers and understanding why it was chosen over another component that does the same job.
* Drawing schematics. Debugging is really hard without a schematic, so on anything remotely complex, my first step was often searching for a schematic. This search often came up empty, so my second step would be following all the traces and looking up all the chips so that I could draw a circuit diagram and figure out roughly what I should expect.
* Soldering. This should be fairly self-explanatory.
Frankly, I haven't gotten past here yet. I'm not terribly good with AC theory or RF stuff. I came to this thread looking for recommendations on that part, but I don't think there's any reason my methods so far wouldn't work; I just haven't had the time.
Next thing I did was design and build a DC lab. I bought my meters and scopes outright, but designed and built my own DC load and power supply. Since I'd already watched Dave's videos about them on EEVBlog, they were obviously influenced by his design, but I made a couple of non-trivial changes to the spec so that I'd have to make my own design decisions. I found this electronics stackexchange post very helpful for heat dissipation calculations [0]. Also, while it's very simple and not suitable for complex or precise work, Falstad's circuit simulator was very helpful for experimenting [1].
My next step was fixing things. This gave me an opportunity to do a bunch of things:
* Become familiar with ICs. At first I always had to look up the number on every IC I saw to figure out how it was supposed to behave before I could test if its actual behavior matched, but over time you'll start recognizing those numbers and understanding why it was chosen over another component that does the same job.
* Drawing schematics. Debugging is really hard without a schematic, so on anything remotely complex, my first step was often searching for a schematic. This search often came up empty, so my second step would be following all the traces and looking up all the chips so that I could draw a circuit diagram and figure out roughly what I should expect.
* Soldering. This should be fairly self-explanatory.
Frankly, I haven't gotten past here yet. I'm not terribly good with AC theory or RF stuff. I came to this thread looking for recommendations on that part, but I don't think there's any reason my methods so far wouldn't work; I just haven't had the time.
[0]: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/55513/can-a-...
[1]: http://www.falstad.com/circuit/