Hey I have been learning electronics for a couple years now. I have the basics down well. Have designed some basic circuits. But I feel like my learning is now at a halt. The gap between beginner stuff and area specific stuff seems too huge. I don't know much to chose an area like embedded or signals. I just want to get a greater depth in my skills. Any suggestions what should I read or do?

 

The microelectronics book by Sedra & Smith is a good place to learn. It goes through the math and explains things in, what I feel is, a clear and concise manner. If you have not had a formal/rigorous experience with electronics this far, this book will help strengthen some of your understandings and equip you toward better understanding on a whole.

With that said, I would suggest you learn a HDL (Verilog or VHDL) and learn how to program a FPGA, then move on to microcontrollers (though others might disagree, I would argue that the experiences learned with the FPGA would better equip you for understanding microcontrollers). This is all assuming you've also had basics in digital logic, which, regardless, I'd recommend Digital Logic Design by Brown - it is a well laid out book that teaches digital logic as well as Verilog (I think a little VHDL too, but I don't take my word for it, I can't remember).

From here, you should have clear enough of an idea of what you want in order to decide what to pursue in depth.

 

I learnt electronics for the last two years in high school and just finished my first year of engineering school(where we only have common courses for 1st years). Besides did physics and math pretty well in high school and first year. Math not a problem. Physics also pretty clear. What I want more is how exactly you'd ecide what component should go where like you know where to hut a bypass capacitor or something and how to pick values for these. Also would like to know more about efficient circuits say like led driver or motor driver. Digital I kinda got bored after I made this project in high school where I made a password lock using switches which were exored and Anded. Then I used a counter to break into the circuit. If I can find more about the specifications and their impacts or problems that come up in designing it will be fun Thanks though.

 

Learning how to select a certain value comes from a firm understanding of the basics. I can't stress that enough. After the basics are established, you can look at things like the frequency domain (useful for determining filter specifications among many others), stability control, power factor, communications, etc. You have barely scratched the surface (with particular respect to your comment on digital circuits), don't get prideful, or you'll miss an opportunity to learn.

 

I guess that came out wrong. What I wanted to say which was also the reason for the 'intermediate' in the question is most of what I try reading is getting repetitive which kind of spoils the fun. I completely realize that I know practically nothing. But the thing is half the stuff u read is repitition of stuff I know while the other half is stuff I simply can't grasp. I need suggestions for reaching from the first to the second half

 

I suppose the question becomes what you consider intermediate...

If you can't grasp the intermediate concepts, it typically shows a lack of understanding the basics. The books I mentioned in post #2 would help to get you past the basics, and through intermediate. If you keep reading the same things repeatedly, perhaps you should find a new source for your information...

 

I'll check out the microelectronics book. Thanks and anything else of I don't want to get into programming?

 

More and more hardware requires software. Unless you plan on getting into something like IC design (very hard to get started in) or power, you will need to know, at least, some programming (even these may vary well change in the future, if not already).

Actually, programming is one of the easier things to learn by yourself (at least it was for me), but if you'd rather wait until a university forces you to, that's your prerogative.