i am new to electronics and very keen to learn, i have been unable to find very much on how you go from a circuit diagram to decideing where to put the components and breaks etc on a breadboard, any help would be greatly appreciated.
Actualy i think i mean stripboard!!! sorry for the confusion
When i started (back in the days when the earth was still cooling) I was told to layout the breadboard accroding to the circuit diagram (components on the left of the cct dig, put on the left of the breadboard etc).
Obviously you want your inputs and outputs close to the edge of the board (for ease of access) and as long as you are not doing anything high frequency, it should not matter about track length.
It depends on what your building. For example, hi impedance inputs (like an opamp) should have a small loop area, especially if there is anything else in the circuit that can generate a field. The larger the loop area, the more susceptible it is to pick-up. For signals that carry “higher” current, the rule-of-thumb is “short and fat”. If the circuit is mixed-signal, you might consider separating the analog and digital sections