Websites & Blogs

• Hackaday sounds like something an 11 year old would call their kiddie script program. But this website has a collection of fascinating blogs, posts; some of them even invaluable. Definitely worth having a look through to see what you could learn or be inspired by.

• Iceamplifiers.co.uk was made by a previous EE lecturer at Uni of Sheff. The man's an analogue genius and he has a huge FAQ document which is invaluable even if you don't give two shits about analogue electronics. He also has notes & past papers for EEE225 which were very helpful for the GAs. 

• FunwithTubes (also a sister site to FunwithTransistors) is a wild ride indeed. Max Robinson made the sites as a retired, physics professor looking for something fun to do.
  The site is always a joy to visit, and has insanely helpful explanations for many aspects of electronics, from vintage radios and tubes, to other topics like electronic simulations. 

• Tpub.com is a relic from the early 2000s on HAM concepts and is good for a non-engineering explanation on RF. It also aged like a fossil, but you wanna know something, if I click on an science website/blog and it looks like it was coded using notepad, then that's how I know that it's a quality piece of content, so don't be fooled by fancy graphics.

• Amasci is one of my favorite blogs to read through and it can break down some concepts of electricity really well. I've given up wishing these websites weren't coded on MS Paint too, but oh well, if this is the price of quality content, I'll gladly pay it.

• Nuts & Volts and Hex & Flex are similar and are geared towards recreationally educational, and I've been pleasantly surprised a few times at how good some of the posts were and I always learn something after reading.

• Stackexchange is one that I know you definitlely know if you've ever tried to program anything. But yeah, super helpful and detailed answers on a lot of different topics.
  Try to slowly read and understand the answers instead of yoinking answers without thinking using the classic CTRL-C and CTRL-V.

• Reddit... just don't grow a neckbeard and start acting like you know everything. Unironically, the best source of information regarding most topics. Here are some subs that had consistently helpful posts, wikis or FAQs in my experience:

  • • r/AskElectronics

    • r/PrintedCircuitBoard

    • r/rfelectronics

    • r/ElectricalEngineering

Youtube

• Youtube has kinda blown up for engineering electronics in the last few years. There was only hobby stuff on there until recently. A few channels I've been enjoying are:

  • DIYPerks is not necessarily an electronics channel, and Theon Gray certainly is no expert on electronics, and yet, he's managed to make projects and systems that I couldn't dream of ever making. And it's not like he's inventing anything, he's just amazing at research and adapting consumer electronics and circuits into his own projects. He's modified and created his own commercial-grade speakers, microphones, consoles using virtually no money. A skill that I think is immensely helpful for any engineer really; plus his videos are super entertaining.

  • Ben Eater has an insanely cool channel covering aspects of digital electronics; although he has gone outside them too. He breaks down complex concepts into super simple explanations and it's amazing to watch what he's done with his understanding. 

  • ElectroBOOM  is what happens when an electrical engineer takes adderall and has access to high voltage devices. Lots of educational, 'controlled' explosions.

  • Great Scott is a hobby channel, but even then has some basic excellent tutorials and I've picked up a lot of practical tips that we don't learn in the course.

  • Altium Academy is owned by the PCB design software company Altium. They have tons of money so have lots of detailed tutorials, and have invited on amazing industry experts like Eric Bogatin, or Rick Hartley who give talks about various aspects of PCB electronic principles

  • Robert Feranec is a high speed PCB God. He was in industry for a long time and knows what he's talking about. He's also released an official course on high speed PCB design, but even his free stuff on the channel is a treasure trove.

  • Phil's Lab is what happens if you summarise and simplify most of the talks from Altium Academy into much smaller, digestable videos. He also has a course on PCB design, however his free stuff is more than enough. I wish he made content when I was starting out in PCB design, because what took me 2 years to discover and learn on my own is suddenly available freely in a few 15min videos on his channel, sigh but oh well at least he's here now.

  • EEVBlog is a huge channel/forum with hundreds of videos on EE topics. The Australian engineer hosting it is an industry veteran who worked for Altium, and other big names. If I had to pick one educational channel to watch for the rest of my life for EE, it would have to be this.

  • BigClive is an Irish madlad who will tear down any electronic gadget he comes upon; so keep your electronics locked away if he's ever near. He's taken apart more things than I've ever owned and explained their inner workings. He also carbonates different alcohols, and it is immensely entertaining to watch.

Industry Application Notes & Articles

• Personal Collection of completely legally obtained resources and app notes collected over the span of several years from every part of the internet I could scour. 

  • Note that there is an inherent sorting system relying on alphabetical order. It theoretically ranks the documents by their importance/helpfulness first. 

  • The sorting system may not make sense outside of google drive, so downloading it might result in some random ass document on the different types of wires being the most important document.

  • Yes, you will have to ask for permission to gain access to it.

Textbooks

• Finally, don't sleep on textbooks. The most helpful source of information and are insanely detailed and comprehensive compared to any youtube video or website you can find. Note that the following recommendations are not tailored for Uni of Sheffield module content; check out your lecturer's reading list for that.
  These are very dense and would be considered more of reference manuals for a personal project, or for reading on only a few certain topics. The books that stand out are (the pdfs are in my personal collection drive):

  • Circuit Theory 

    • Sedra - Microelectronic Circuits 

    • Chua, Desoer and Kuh -Linear and Nonlinear Circuits 

  • Electronic Design

    • Horowitz -The Art of Electronics 

    • Scherz -Practical electronics for inventors 

  • Signals

    • Oppenheim -Signals and systems 

  • Comms & Electromagnetism

    • Hayt and Buck - Engineering Electromagnetics 

    • Constantine Balanis - Antenna Theory: Analysis and Design

    • Pozar - Microwave Engineering

    • Griffith - Electrodynamics 

  • Digital Design and Computer Architecture

    • Harris - Digital Design and Computer Architecture 

    • Howard Johnson - High-Speed Digital Design: Handbook of Black Magic 

  • Programming

    • Downey - How to think like computer scientists: learning with python 

    • Kernighan and Ritchie - The C programming language