There never will be a truly great way to learn by yourself, until very high quality free design tools become widely available. This is not the case today. Free

There never will be a truly great way to learn by yourself, until very high quality free design tools become widely available. This is not the case today. Free EE tools are still terrible compared to, for example, tools used in software development. The very expensive tools are still very lacking as well. I'm also of the mind that you can't really learn any field 100% purely by "analysis", and without doing any "creation" - as is the typical undergraduate academic approach. I'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me on this. They're wrong.