Revision Topics

First of all it should be noted that I am neither an expert or a teacher of any kind. These notes were written purely as part of my own revision process and not as an authoritative source. That said I am happy for anyone to freely make use of them if it helps. Just make sure that you fact check anything that I say before making life changing decisions based what you read here.

I am intending that these notes will cover a wide range of basic electronics theory as I attempt to remind myself of the things that I have learned over a lifetime of tinkering and education (though that was the best part of half a century ago now).

I am not intending that these notes will go deep into the maths, though I will try to show how important equations are derived. I do this because I am a big believer in minimising the amount that I have to remember. If I can get away with committing just one equation to memory and deriving a bunch of others from that in real time when necessary, then that is a win as far as I am concerned.

One thing worth noting before we dive in to the subject matter is that quite a lot of the units used are named after the people that invented/discovered them. Convention has it that in such cases:

When the name of the unit is used in full it is spelled entirely in lowercase (even though it is a persons name). For example: coulomb, joule, watt, volt, and ampere.
When the first letter of the unit name is used to specify the unit, it is done as an uppercase letter. For the above examples these are: C, J, W, V, and I.
When referring to the actual person that the unit is named after, then their name is capitalised, as is normal in the English language. Again for the above examples: Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, James Prescott Joule, James Watt, Alessandro Volta, and André-Marie Ampère.