Some hints on how to get to the meat of a circuit: The most important thing is to learn what to ignore, stuff that has to be there to help a circuit work, but

Some hints on how to get to the meat of a circuit: The most important thing is to learn what to ignore, stuff that has to be there to help a circuit work, but that don't tell you much about what it does - ignore all the power stuff - in particular capacitors oriented with the two lines horizontal are usually decoupling capacitors, ones oriented the other way tend to carry interesting signals - learn to find and ignore the biasing resistors around transistors Rules of thumb: - outputs of transistors are usually inverted from their inputs if taken from the collector/drain - signals usually move from left to right - chips vaguely have inputs on the left and outputs on the right (or pins that work together grouped together)