/diy/ - Do It Yourself

Greetings Ohmians

I've dabbled with electronics in the past, building a radio, those 101-in-1 kits. Most of that has been instructional, i.e. solder this, connect that there etc, but it never explained what was going on under the hood. This is what I want to learn.

I don't really want to get a kit at the moment. My room's already a mess with half finished projects here and there. Also with semiconductors there seems to be so many variants of a single component, e.g. hundreds of diodes and thousands of transistors. I mean to me I thought a diode was pretty simple: it lets current through one way. Why do you need so many? And I get the feeling that even if I get myself a starter kit, I will still need to keep on buying new components and end up with a massive stockpile of unused ones.

I specifically want to learn about analog electronics, obviously the basics at first. I good target for me would be to understand and build a simple amplifier using discrete components.

I've used SPICE before for basic simulation before. And I was wondering if I could use it for learning electronics from the ground up in place of physical components. Could I work through a standard electronics textbook and do the exercise and try out the circuits all through SPICE? Is it accurate enough?

I obviously do intend to build physical circuits eventually, but I just don't want to invest in the outlay for the moment.