Hyperphysics does a decent job of providing some insight: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/pplate.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/h

Hyperphysics does a decent job of providing some insight: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/pplate.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/pplate.h... The "first principles" part of E&M has some tricky math which can be mitigated by a well chosen problem domain. If you really want to dive into it, I hope you love (or learn to love) multi-variate calculus, linear algebra, and switching coordinate systems (cartesian, polar, spherical) multiple times to solve a problem.