[rounce]

Falstad CircuitJS[0] is excellent and far better than the mess of a breadboard IMHO. It also allows easily instrumenting the circuits at multiple points so you can get a sense of the changes in ‘realtime’ without having to get (and learn to use) an oscilloscope (yet).

0: https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html

[ge96]

I was referring to the visual aspect eg. this is literally a 3D capacitor vs. -|(- which may be harder for casual electronic hobbyists.

Less for theory more visually "this wire goes here"

[rounce]

Breadboards, whilst initially appearing to be nice and accessible, tend to be a false economy when it comes to building a good intuition around a lot of fundamentals. This is because it’s a lot easier to reason about the basics with ‘perfect’ circuit and component behaviour than the messiness of reality. For example in a ‘perfect’ circuit wires can have no resistance or inductance (unless you want them to), in reality it’s unavoidable that they do, by how much will vary for reasons that may not be obvious to a beginner. I’m not saying breadboards are universally bad, they have a place but IMHO learning fundamentals directly through them ain’t it. I spent a long time stubbornly trying to learn things breadboard-first and in hindsight it was horrendously confusing versus drawing schematics, doing the math, and then playing in something like Circuit JS. It was only then that really important things started to really become second nature.

There’s also the other thing of being able to read documentation. If one wants to use some module in one’s project, the datasheet and application notes aren’t going to have breadboard-centric illustrations, they’re going to have schematics (or at least abstracted ones). I presume you come from a programming background, and so would know the importance of being able to read documentation, and knowing that if you can’t do that you’re pretty much dead in the water.

The hard part of learning about electronics is not identifying the components but getting a good understanding of what is happening in the circuit. For that, it’s better to have a learning tool which displays voltage and current at every part of the circuit all the time. Rather than something which prioritises looking like what you’d have on your desk as a constraint for its method of visual representation.