This is an anecdote but I hope it helps someone. I couldn't understand electronics for the longest time. I read all about the individual components and I understood them individually, but I still couldn't grasp what they did when put together. Digital circuits made perfect sense to me though. Finally I learned about the "LRC" circuit. When you put those 3 components together, you can understand their behavior with some equations. You can dial in some coefficients to get the behavior (the signal/wave) that you desire. I don't know how someone thought to put those components together into a unit originally though.