thinking of exploring digital electronics

A more complex question than it appears! An easy explaination is to think of digital as "switched DC", i.e. it switches between say 5VDC and 0VDC.

Yes, those Tandy/RadioShack 300-in-1 kits are an excellent introduction. Many top electronics designers started on those kits. The best way to learn electronics is to build stuff and experiment, learn the simple building block circuits first. *Don't* start with transistor or semiconductor theory, it will just confuse things and you'll think it's all too hard. Even if you don't quite understand how the basic building blocks work, that's ok for now. Learn all about ohms law, basic AC and DC theory, and then all the digital gates (AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR) and digital building blocks like Flip-Flops, counters, decoders etc.

Books are great, but can get too too technical (and boring), be careful.

For starters you could do a lot worse than Colin Mitchell's Digital Electronics book:

I'm sure there are plenty of online digital courses too.

Dave :)

Here are some sample pages from the book:

If you like it you can order the book here:

Dave :)

i couldn't google up any "att handbook" but i put a hold on the public library's copy of "art of electronics". thanks all around for the input.

peace

If you're mainly interested in microcontrollers, pick a development board (off the top of my head one with great bang for the buck is the Atmel AVR Butterfly -- only $20). Get something with integrated buttons and LEDs so you can stick to the programming part you're comfortable with. When you want to branch out, most of those boards have spare IOs you can hook to your own creations. Check out piclist.com (though I would have to recommend newcomers strongly consider AVR instead, since it's easier to get a free C development environment going for AVR).

DC. Was 5 VDC, moved to 3.3, now going below that.

You can still get "grab bags" of assorted TTL chips from places like Jameco (watch for line wrap)

Might be worthwhile getting one, a breadboard, and a small bench power supply to fiddle with.

A breadboard like one of these

If you don't have ready access to an o'scope and/or a logic analyzer you can do a lot with an inexpensive logic probe:

The "TTL Cookbook" mentioned at

Eventually you'll probably want to move to hardware description languages like VHDL, Verilog, others, instead of relying on discrete gates. You might consider downloading the free HDL tools from Xilinx or Altera that let you "hook up" virtual circuits and trace the results in their simulator. Nothing like starting out learning to straighten pins, though ...

Learn analog first. Digital will come in time. If you don't follow the logical path, things will get very confusing and you will have huge, gaping holes in your knowledge.

Not necessarily dived into digital electronics, but I can highly recommend this URL: