Getting "pissed off" just because you don't know WTF you are doing is not an effective way to learn almost anything. It's a good thing you didn't start trying to learn electronics with vacuum tubes containing thermionic emitters, one or more plates (anodes), and several wire grids or beam-forming electrodes between the emitter(s) and the anode(s). Testing all combinations of voltage and polarity applied to pairs of electrodes on a vacuum tube can take awhile, with no guarantee that any combination you try will produce a useful circuit.
And God forbid if you ever get introduced to the
Burroughs beam-switching decade counter tube, used for what was then high-speed pulse counting in the 1960s and capable of directly driving Nixie display tubes. This one rates right up there with the venerable
phantastron circuit in terms of trying to understand how either one actually works. But it's worth the effort. A little physics, a lot a math, some grounding in theory and you could be an expert in practically no time. Of course you would then need re-training to grok semiconductors, but vacuum tube circuits may be making a comeback because they are virtually immune to radiation damage, which is useful for, say, an Earth to Mars mission. This would be a good time to pick a path to success, maybe even garner a mission-seat on the first human-manned (as opposed to robots) mission to Mars. What a thrill that would be! And you could tell all those semiconductor weenies to go pound sand, which is what semiconductors are usually made from... silicon semiconductors anyway.
I can remember as a teenager in the 1960s spending some time at the base electronics hobby shop in Smyrna, Tennessee. This was
Dad's last "permanent duty station" before he retired. The electronics hobby shop occupied one half an isolated wood-framed building and the other half was set up as a class room for airmen trying to improve their education. I knew zip about transistors, but there were some becoming available to hobbyists at that time, so the airman (a staff sergeant IIRC) who ran the hobby shop and I developed a "bread board" system for building and testing circuits.
This DIY bread-board involved drilling opposing holes through two non-conducting panels in a grid-like layout... perhaps as many as a hundred holes in a 10x10 array paced about an inch apart, although I recall making a smaller version for myself, about 25 holes on a 5x5 grid. One set of holes was much larger than the other, allowing room to stick a finger tip through those holes. We gathered up a hundred or so steel paper clips, unfolded them, and then bent them back into a long, slender, oval and soldered the ends together. Next the two panels were assembled with spacers so the modified paper clips would just peek through the small holes on the top panel when the other end of the paper clip was flush with the hole opposite.
Finally, high-test nylon fishing line was threaded through all the paper clips at the larger holes in a criss-cross fashion. The fishing line was pulled as tight as we could and it served as a "spring" to draw down the paper clip protruding from the top panel until it was flush with the top panel. Now for the "fun" part. We pushed up from the bottom with a finger to create a little loop of paper clip wire protruding from the top of the panel. Into this loop we could insert two or more wires. Voila! a prototyping bread-board of sorts. Not good for very complicated circuits, and the contact with the wires stuck through the paper clips was somewhat iffy, but we made do. We built oscillators and audio amplifiers mostly, and tried to learn transistor theory from the text books stored in the next room. Neither I nor my airman mentor understood much about how transistors worked.
So we experimented. IIRC we did try reversing the emitter and collector connections, operating the transistor :"upside down" so to speak. This actually sort of worked, but with virtually no gain compared to the normal "right side up" configuration. So we abandoned that idea and were careful to identify the emitter, base, and collector terminals of each transistor. It was about ten years later, after a four-year tour of duty in the Air Force, and later study at the University of Dayton in pursuit of a degree in electrical engineering, that I finally began to appreciate the physics of transistors. This turned out to be essential to understanding why I couldn't "make" a transistor by soldering together two siilicon diodes.
Ah, well. Learning electronics is a journey, not a destination. But it is easy to get side-tracked because of some lack of understanding regarding some vitally important concepts. Good luck on your journey
@ratstar. It does not require any understanding of Maxwell's Equations to operate a radio, but such understanding goes a long way toward designing and building a radio system.
