A couple of years ago I saw a few of Ben Eater's video series "Build an 8 bit computer on breadboards". After forgetting about it, I recently rediscovered them and have been consuming them in detail. That prompted me to buy the kit from his site and start building my own...
The kit arrived to the UK after a few days and I'm ready to dig in. You can find out more about my 8bit computer build here, or click the Projects link at the top of the page.
I'm a software engineer by profession, and I'm comfortable with how computers work at a reasonably low level, and back in the last century during a brief period as a CompSci tutor I even taught a group of students about how a CPU works (fetch execute cycle etc...).
But - that was all a long time ago.
Starting with Ben's introductory videos that lead to building the 555 timer clock circuits, I realised that I didn't reaally know what a capacitor was (a kind of battery?), the difference between current and voltage, what's the point of pull-up/pull-down resistors... so began my journey down the youtube rabbit hole.
Here is a curated list of videos that I found useful for background learning.