so ive been wanting to get into ham radio for a while now, my neighbor has a setup and it looks really cool, he told me to just go get my technician license first and then figure out the rest from there. i downloaded the ARRL technician manual but honestly its a lot and i dont even know if im reading the right stuff or if there's a better way to study. like do i need to memorize all of it or is there a smarter way to go about this. also heard something about a question pool, is that the actual test questions or just practice stuff? sorry if this is a dumb question im really new to all of this

not a dumb question at all, everyone starts somewhere. so the question pool is legit the actual questions the test is pulled from, like they publish the whole thing publicly which is kind of nice honestly. the FCC requires that all the questions come from that pool so if you study every question in the pool you literally cannot fail. hamStudy.org is probably the best free resource, just do flashcard mode every day for a few weeks and youll be fine. the ARRL book is good background but you dont need to read the whole thing cover to cover to pass, some people just grind the question pool and show up and pass no problem. i'd say spend maybe 2-3 weeks on hamStudy and then take a practice exam until you're consistently hitting 85% or better before you go sit for the real thing.

yeah what he said about hamstudy, thats basically all i used. took me maybe 3 weeks of like 20 mins a night and passed first try. one thing i'll add is dont overthink the electrical theory questions, a lot of people get scared of those but honestly if you just memorize the answers to the specific questions in the pool you'll be fine even if you dont fully understand ohms law yet or whatever. you can learn the why later once you actually have the license and start playing around with stuff. the test is 35 questions and you need 26 right so theres some room to miss a few