Hi, Im glad you're picking up a new hobby, hopefully you'll start to love electronics as much as I do. The reason we need use a resistor as a load is because you generally don't want to make a circuit without some kind of load simply because the wire itself has a very small resistance maybe 0.1 Ohms, so we don't have control over the current, that might be a bit confusing so i think the best way to understand would be to try the following LED circuit yourself: everycircuit.com/circuit/6020702572118016 In this circuit we know the LED only want about 20mA, which we control using ohms law by having a 12V source and taking off 2V for the LED voltage drop, and a 500 ohm resistor, V/R=I or 10/500=20mA Try seeing if you can make the circuit work without a load resistor, you'll notice the LED will keep blowing up, the only way you'll be able to make it work is if you set the supply to 2V which is the voltage drop of the LED. Essentially we like to try and always use a load resistor because without it you don't really have control over the current. Onto your next main question, the way a diode works is below 0.7 Ohms its resistance is extremely high, but above that value its resistance lowers very quickly, this is why we call them semi-conductors as they conduct electricity some of the time. Forward current is a measure of the maximum current you can flow through a diode when above that 0.7V, it will be different for every diode. The graph has voltage on the X axis and current on the y axis so its a graph of both current and voltage, the reason it has no values is because the graph will differ for every diode you find, some will have lower breakdown voltages for example, some will have high forward current. There are even diodes that have different voltage drops, I will be doing a video on them soon. I hope that I have been helpful, let me know if you have any questions in response, happy to help :)

@@electronicshandbook8788 This is excellent! Thank you for responding. A circuit with no load on it is a short circuit, right? And that is a bad thing. I get it. I have practiced doing circuit analysis. I find math fascinating. Yesterday I soldered up my first circuit. It was a push button and an LED, running on 9 volts with a terminal block to add wires to get the 9V into the board. It worked perfectly. I have bought an Arduino Super Starter Kit and I have been loving it. Now I'm looking for simple but useful circuits to build. I think I'm hooked. :-D