Funny thing is that what really got me interested in all of this was quitting smoking, started vaping and decided to make my own. Got into arduino, programmed one up, realized I needed more power and found Dave on youtube. First video was regarding opamps. wow, blew my mind. Enough so that I just had to get into this. It's just been crazy that 1/2 of my questions seem to be answered by someone telling me to learn. WTF?! that's what I'm trying to do.
Yes i once gave away an old PC PSU to a guy that was doing E-Smoking. I don't think your reason for entering electronics is unique.
forums are great for thrashing out ideas and talking about different ways of doing things and perhaps getting insight on one specific problem. but you need enough knowledge to have that discussion, if every time we give you a pointer in another direction you need to start again it means you might need a bit more foundation. I don't know anything about E-smoking (other than the unintentional silicone kind
) but people that seem to are concerned that you may be on the road to doing yourself an injury.
Wikipedia is actually a decent online resource and if you look up a component on it you will find tons of information about it. A lot of it probably too deep and unneccesary but it will give you a good grounding. We can go into deep theory of every aspect of your projects or each thread will turn into a book.
If you have a question about a specific part of theory we can easily expand on that and help explain it.