Reading resistor colors

Resistors are too small to print a number on, so their value is written in a color code — a row of painted bands. It looks cryptic at first, but it follows one simple pattern: the first bands are digits, the next band is a multiplier, and the last is tolerance.

Worked example: Brown-Black-Red. Brown = 1, Black = 0, so the digits are "10". Red is the ×100 multiplier. 10 × 100 = 1000Ω = 1 kΩ. The shiny gold or silver band at the end isn’t part of the value — it tells you how accurate the resistor is (gold = ±5%).