A curated list of free courses in electrical engineering, digital circuits, analog design, AI hardware, and hands-on making. No affiliate links, no upsells. If a course is here, an engineer thought it was worth your time.
Where every EE student starts. Circuits, voltage, current, and the physics underneath. If you're new to electrical engineering — or filling in gaps from a self-taught background — start here.
The canonical MIT undergraduate circuits course taught by Prof. Anant Agarwal. Covers resistive elements and networks, MOS transistors, amplifiers, energy storage, first- and second-order dynamics, and both analog and digital circuit design. Rigorous — assumes calculus and some physics.
Beautifully paced beginner lessons: Ohm's law, Kirchhoff's laws, AC/DC analysis, RLC circuits, op-amps. Short videos with practice problems. No prior EE background needed.
A complete free online textbook covering DC circuits, AC circuits, semiconductors, digital electronics, and reference tables. Written like the best professor you never had — clear, thorough, no jargon padding.
The updated edX version of MIT 6.002, run interactively on the edX platform. Same Anant Agarwal instruction, refreshed exercises, cleaner interface. The audit track is free and gives you full course access; certificates cost money but you don't need one to learn.
India's national online education program hosts full-semester engineering courses from IIT professors. The Basic Electrical Circuits course covers everything a first-year EE undergrad needs. Video-heavy, exam-oriented.
The math backbone behind circuits, filters, communication systems, and control. Covers Fourier analysis, Laplace transforms, z-transforms, and how they connect to real-world signals. Prerequisite for almost every advanced EE topic.
From logic gates to full CPU designs. This is where you learn how modern computers actually work — not just how to program them.
Start with a NAND gate. End with a working computer running Tetris. Six hands-on projects that walk you through building every layer of a computer from scratch: gates, ALU, CPU, assembler, VM, compiler, OS. Taught at 400+ universities worldwide. The full course + software is free at the official site.
Same content as above but with structured video lectures on Coursera by Prof. Shimon Schocken. Audit track is free. Split across two parts (hardware then software). Great if you prefer video pacing over a website of PDFs.
MIT's undergraduate computer architecture course. Digital design, RISC instruction sets, pipelined processors, cache hierarchies, virtual memory. If you want to work on real hardware or systems programming, this is the foundation.
Build a functional 8-bit computer from bare logic gates on breadboards. 44 videos covering clock design, registers, ALU, RAM, program counter, control logic, and instruction execution. Long-form, patient, deeply satisfying to watch and follow along.
Once you've built an 8-bit computer from gates, this series walks through wiring a real 6502 microprocessor (the CPU from the NES, Apple II, Commodore 64). Covers memory mapping, LCD interfacing, keyboard input, and BASIC ROM.
A full-semester IIT course on digital logic design: Boolean algebra, combinational circuits, sequential circuits, state machines, FPGAs and Verilog. Exam-oriented, video-heavy, comes with problem sets.
The hard, beautiful, non-linear side of electronics. Op-amps, transistors, filters, RF, control systems — the topics that separate people who "know electronics" from people who can actually build things.
A graduate-level treatment of analog integrated circuits. Bipolar and MOS transistor circuits, feedback, differential amplifiers, op-amp design. Legendary MIT course — challenging, but this is where you go if you want to be a real analog designer.
Maxwell's equations, transmission lines, wave propagation, antennas. Prerequisite for RF, communications, and high-speed digital design. Serious math (vector calculus required), but taught with real engineering applications throughout.
Dave Jones' long-running series covering practical analog electronics: oscilloscope basics, multimeter usage, op-amp real-world behavior, decoupling capacitors, EMI, PSU design. Not academic — this is how working engineers think about circuits.
A full undergraduate electronics course on Coursera by Prof. Bonnie Ferri. Covers diodes, transistors, amplifiers, op-amps, and simple circuit design. Well-produced, clear pacing. Audit for free; certificate optional.
IIT Kharagpur's full analog electronics course. BJT and MOSFET amplifiers, feedback, op-amp applications, oscillators, voltage regulators. Comprehensive and exam-focused.
GPUs, Tensor Cores, semiconductor manufacturing, neural network hardware. The stuff that connects "I understand circuits" to "I understand why H100s are $30,000."
Andrej Karpathy (former Director of AI at Tesla, OpenAI co-founder) walks through building neural networks from scratch — starting with backpropagation, ending at a working GPT. Legendarily clear pedagogy. All lectures, notebooks, and code are free.
The single most influential deep learning course on the internet. Covers convolutional neural networks, from linear classifiers to modern architectures. Lecture videos, notes, and assignments are freely available on the course website.
Andrew Ng's revamped introduction to ML, running on Coursera in partnership with Stanford Online and DeepLearning.AI. Covers supervised learning, neural networks, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning fundamentals. Audit is free.
Physics of semiconductor devices — how transistors actually work at the atomic level. Covers PN junctions, MOSFETs, BJTs, and modern nanoscale device physics. Heavy on solid-state physics.
Grant Sanderson's visual explanation of what neural networks are actually doing under the hood. Covers backpropagation, gradient descent, transformers, and attention with beautiful animations. Not a coding course — an intuition course.
Stanford's newer graduate course on building large language models from first principles. Covers tokenization, transformer internals, training infrastructure, and inference optimization. Lecture videos and materials publicly available.
Hands-on learning. PCB design, embedded systems, microcontrollers, actual soldering irons. The stuff that turns theory into shipping products.
Phil Salmony's tutorials on real PCB design using KiCad, altium, and STM32 microcontrollers. Covers signal integrity, power supply design, USB, high-speed layout. Straight from a working hardware engineer, no fluff.
Beginner-friendly project-based electronics tutorials. Explains transistors, MOSFETs, voltage regulators, motors, and basic circuit topologies. Well-produced short videos. Good for first-year students or curious beginners.
MIT's lab-focused analog electronics course. Hands-on exercises with op-amps, transistors, filters, and audio circuits. Includes full lab manuals and design problems. If you have access to basic bench equipment, follow along and actually build the circuits.
DigiKey's professionally-produced tutorials on soldering, microcontrollers (Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ESP32), sensors, and basic circuit prototyping. Not a course per se — a well-organized library of practical lessons.
Design and build microcontroller-based systems. Covers real-time programming, hardware interfacing, sensors, actuators, and complete project design. Older course, but foundational concepts are still current.