It's a good question: How best to start in electronics.
For some electronics is soldering resistors together into little shapes that resemble people. It seems for some of these people the rougher the better. All knobbly is arty.
I could never do that. No artistic talent. They can obviously start with a soldering iron & a few resistors.
Some seem to accentuate the "hacking", derived I guess form the likes of people who use a chainsaw to make a table. While sometimes "hacking" means adaptation, re-purposing, oftentimes it seems to mean taking a random unknown circuit & seeing if it will work with another random unknown circuit, without mind to whether they share any specifications, like power supply voltage, polarity or signalling. This oftentimes leads to things that sometimes work, sometimes die quickly sometimes run well & provide vindication to the approach,
For me, sure, I experimented, enough to know nothing worked as I wanted until I understood more. I read the books as soon as I could find them. For me, understand the specs, do it once, do it right. Fit for purpose.
Fit for your purpose.
Learn - do courses. online or otherwise. Get the getting started books in the topics that interest. Make the projects. Read the explanation about how it works.
Read the components specs. Read the pages about how to read the specs.
Accumulate a junk box of raw material.
Always have circuits to take apart for salvage, adaptation, hacking if you like or must.
Personally at the very beginning, I lacked resources. Those kitsets that are based on prototyping boards, those plug in & go ones were a godsend. If you start off with poor soldering & poor knowledge & poor assembly technique, difficult to know why it failed.
Prototyping boards, the plastic ones with lots of holes.
A few components.
Learn a little about electricity for electronics. (For me, many of those ones about materials & atomic structure left me a little cold. You get those at school.)
Find some info you like on voltages, currents, resistances.
Learn what the basic components do.
Look at sample simple circuits & see how they work.
Physics convention: batteries go left to right, often multiple batteries. Never understood what motivated that. Current flows any which way - Seen so many of those circuits that just never looked right to me.
Engineering convention: batteries go vertical, power at the top, ground lower. Things flow down. - Always seemed to make more sense. Those circuits always seemed easier to follow, for me,
Test equipment, a ,multimeter.
then kitsets & soldering.
then books/courses
Understand what you've already done to move ahead.
DiffAmp, above - mentioned - a mentor. Someone you can ask. A good concept. Maybe can be replaced with a forum, now. Not sure.
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Learn to tell what's a guess & what sounds right. Some will not say so clearly.
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Just my view.
