If you want to be a EE guy then you have to learn the way as EE guy did, to see the schematic and to identify the components as capacitor, there are many different capacitors, resistors, diodes, bjt(transistor), Mosfets, led, relay, coil, etc ...
When you want to do the experiments then you just to see the schematic and to put the components into the breadboard, step by step, adding the +V and GND with the circuit into breadboard, to see the results and to debug the bugs, until the circuit works successful.