Adafruit Guide to Excellent Soldering
Adafruit
Guide from Adafruit to through-hole hand soldering: choosing irons, tips and solder, preparing and tinning the tip, heating pad and lead together, recognizing good and faulty joints, and fixing common problems such as cold joints and bridges. Beginners finish able to make reliable joints.
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Soldering Is Easy: Here's How to Do It
A seven-page illustrated comic that teaches a complete beginner to make a good through-hole solder joint: iron care, tinning, heating the joint rather than the solder, good versus bad joints, and safety. Free PDF under CC BY-SA, translated into over 20 languages.
EEVblog #186 - Soldering Tutorial Part 3 - Surface Mount
Hand soldering of surface-mount parts under a microscope: tacking a single pad, small passives, SOIC and fine-pitch QFP packages, drag soldering with flux, clearing bridges with wick, and checking joints for wetting and opens. Covers the surface-mount part of the topic, which the existing Adafruit guide (mostly through-hole) does not.
EEVblog #183 - Soldering Tutorial Part 2
Best-known free close-up video demonstration of through-hole technique, grounded in engineering. Dave Jones demonstrates through-hole hand soldering under magnification: tip choice, heating pad and lead together, how much solder to feed, wetting, fillet shape, common faulty joints, and desoldering with wick. Part 1 (EEVblog #180) covers irons, solder, flux and tools.
PACE Basic Soldering Lessons 1-9
The only free video course that teaches to a workmanship standard (terminal types, acceptable fillets, heat control) rather than hobby tips. PACE's industrial training films on hand soldering: solder and flux, PCB terminals, cup, bifurcated, hook and pierced terminals, and component soldering. They show what acceptable joints look like, with heat-control and cleanliness rules in the style of military and NASA workmanship standards. Old films, unchanged technique.