How does one "learn electronics"?

[zednam]

Sorry in advance if anything is wrong about this post, i'm not an avid forum user.

So, to keep things short and sweet, i like electronics, it's what im planning on studying after school, but i want to start learning myself.

 I understand the very basics, not much past ohms law. I can solder at a very amateur level with a cheapo hot stick. I have a decent understanding of mathematics and phisics,dont know calculus but im willing to learn.

To make things a bit less all-encompassing, i recently had an idea for an all pcb variable sided electronic dice. of course, with my limited knowledge i have no idea how id go past the idea phase into prototyping or designing the circuit/pcb.

So basically, i want to learn enough to design and make my own circuits (things like the project i described above, other "mitxela" type projects, cc led drivers, etc.), understand how the things im using work, and to lay a solid framework before i study at uni.

I don't know what to even start with, are there any resources you guys could suggest? All i want is a general guideline on what to learn in what order and i can likely find the rest myself. I'm not expecting to know all of electronics by next week but it'd be ideal if i could (if possible) know enough to prototype the project described in a few months / by the end of the year.

Also i'd love a good resource for learning soldering, i can blame it on cheap hardware all i want but nothings going to improve if i don't improve myself.

[Andy Chee]

I started with building kits from electronics magazines. Magazines are good because they (usually) have a detailed description of how the design works.

[zilp]

The question is: Do you want to learn more on the electronics/electrical engineering side or more on the software side?

I guess most people would implement your project idea of a variable-sided "die" with software nowadays, be it just on a PC or smartphone, or using a microcontroller. But there isn't much electronics in there, other than hooking up some LEDs and buttons to the microcontroller.

It's a problem that can reasonably be solved with discrete electronics, too, though. I guess the traditional approach would be a VCO (something like CD4046) controlled by an RC circuit driving a counter (like CD4017, or possibly some binary/BCD counter plus BCD-to-7 segment converter, depending on the output format you want). You probably can find schematics for that on the web, or you could try figuring it out yourself.

There is a lot you can learn in either direction, but the approaches are very different.

Of course, you can also buy textbooks and stuff (or read online introductory texts), but learning by just building projects and figuring stuff out along the way certainly is a fine way to learn things, too. You just have to be careful to not fall into the trap of using ready-made modules for everything if you want to learn how stuff works. Buying a bunch of modules and writing some arduino project from github into an MCU generally won't teach you much.