Electrical Engineering Fundamentals

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I'm not in a good position to take on coursework right now, so I want to teach myself the electrical engineering basics using whatever I find on the internet.

I've taken a lot of the math classes already. I'm thinking about using brilliant.org to round out what I know about math, and help learn physics

Between edX and coursera, there are a lot of engineering classes available, I'm having trouble choosing the right ones, but I have time to figure something out.

I'm open to good resources for learning electrical engineering, free is better, but I'm willing to pay if it comes to that. I could really use some direction on what topics to study.

Khan academy

If you teach yourself, it won't be ABET accreditation

You won't get a Bachelor or master degree

I'll have to go to a university eventually, I just want to get a leg up on the material. Khan Academy was great for learning math, I'll check out their EE section, I didn't like their physics section because there weren't enough exercises, I don't understand the material if I don't have enough problems to work out.

The hardest parts of electrical engineering are solving 2nd order differential equations and electromagnetic theory.

Antennas by Kraus is a free download on the Internet.

I just checked out Khan Academy again, the EE section has more practice problems than physics (which was virtually all videos), I think it'll work well.

I browsed the book BTDT, it looks very through. My formal classes stopped short of diffeq and physics, I take it I need to understand those topics better before I get started on it. Did this book help you?

Khan Academy helped get me grounded in algebra, it was the non-stop problems that really did the trick. After integral calculus, the teaching style turns mostly to videos with much fewer practice problems. That's why I've decided to turn to other sites to learn physics and the more advanced math.

First year calculus is just single variable. 2nd year you get to solve engineering problems involving two variable calculus. I'd do that before tackling books like Antennas. Yes, that is a good book that helped me.

If you can understand the following topics and how they interrelate, then you're well on your way to your goal.

Boolean Logic
Compensation Theorem
Delta-Star Transformation
Joule's Law
Kirchhoff's Laws
Maximum Power Transfer Theorem
Millman's Theorem
Norton's Theorem
Norton and Thévenin Equivalence
Nyquist Theorem
Ohm's Law
Reactance & Resonance
Reciprocity Theorem
Star-Delta Transformation
Superposition Theorem
Thévenin's Theorem

Thanks Fnord, that really helps me figure out what to look for. I forgot allaboutcircuits.com, they cover a lot of those topics.

I think it would take me at least a year to go over Antennas. It looks like it focuses on the science behind em wave transmission. There were a lot of unfamiliar terms in the pages I looked at, it'll be a slow read. I'm not going to start it until I understand more of the basics. I actually took multivariable calc a few years ago, I think I'll go over it again anyway though.

Well, it looks like I have enough lined up to keep me busy for awhile.

The beauty of really understanding theorems is that they serve as a quick and easy BS detector.

Perhaps the most useful of which is Shannon's channel capacity theorem. There are so many charlatans promising clever ways of beating that one!

As a professional you don't want to waste your time trying to do the impossible. That is, unless you are properly compensated for doing that.

Another BS detector is knowing a few basic Physics Theorems -- Thermodynamics, especially.

Wasted energy turns to heat.
No perpetual motion machines.
No free energy machines.

But, the most important rule, if you do become an engineer making lots of money.

If you are presented with an investment deal that is too good to be true, walk away.
Especially if you are an Aspie.

So if someone claims to have faster data rates, you just apply the theorem to predict how many errors will show up? That's useful to know. edX has Thermodynamics courses (for free), it sounds like the kind of topic that would take a few different courses to really understand.

"Always despise the free lunch" and "If it appears too good to be true, then it almost certainly is" are a couple of points from Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power. His books are like reading Aesop's Fables, but for grown-ups. He doesn't flinch from the pitfalls of human nature/behavior; a lot of his advice has to do with ways we get deceived or manipulated.

My starting point is a review of logarithms lol, I keep learning them and then forgetting them, never got enough practice.
Thanks for all the help, I think I have a good outline of what to study.

This is the curriculum I'm going with:

I'm still refreshing all the calculus I learned, I'm skipping over things like mean value theorem and Reimann Summs.

I didn't include chemistry because I already took it, I didn't fully understand it past Stoichiometry and ideal gas laws though.

I think matlab is useful to learn, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's useful across the EE disciplines because of its number crunching and data visualization capabilities. Is it better to just use excel or octave?

I've collected some testing equipment over the years, I tied it all together with a home project a few months ago; it's basically a bunch of discreet components wired into banana jacks on a board. I know this thing looks rickety, but it makes better connections than breadboards, is easier to trace and test, makes less of a mess, and doesn't require nearly as much hunching over to work on. Past digital multimeters, function generators, and oscilloscopes, I'm not sure what other tools I would need or find useful, at least now anyway.

op-amps for everyone. Free ebook