To what do I connect the grounding-setup, as a whole? (The mat, or the wrist-strap, or whatever.) I've been told everything from a water-pipe (would have to run a wire to the ceiling, there's nothing down low in the room), to the center-screw of a wall-outlet (really!?) … and, practically-speaking, how do you suggest I do so? Wrap a bare/stripped copper wire around the screw, or around the pipe? Or what?
You want everything Earthed. The center screw of a wall outlet is probably easiest. Make sure you verify that your work area's electrical installation is up to code, and there isn't a ground neutral reversal, for example. Your mat and wrist strap will probably have spade lugs for making the connection.
I know I should be working on an ESD-disappating mat, with an ESD-disappating wrist-strap on at all times. To what do I connect these? Do I connect them together, i.e. to a common point, as well? (From my still-fledging understanding, there should be a single shared ground amongst all points in the circuit, which I suppose includes your body if you touch a conductive part of the board, so …)
Connect them both together, back at Earth.
Is the “ground”, as discussed in terms of dissipating triboelectric
potential / electrostatic charge, the same as the “ground” in circuits
I'm working on? i.e. should I be connecting “ground” in any circuit,
with a wire, to the same grounding-system we're discussing here? Or is
that a separate ground? I've also got a bench power-supply with a
‘ground’ banana-socket, which I'm sure will be used for circuits, so I
suppose … if the answer here is yes, I should wire that to this
common-ground as well?
This is a topic for a separate question all together. Ground has come to be a generic term for circuit common, or zero Volt reference. You may, or may not, be able to make Earth your circuit common, depending on your circuit in question. If your bench power supply is galvanically isolated, it's typically ok to make that connection. More often than not that is through the ground clip on an oscilloscope. For ESD purposes, you don't connect to your circuit. You need to be careful about this, and research it further.
The bench multimeter I've acquired has a grounding screw on the back, next to the three-prong power-plug. Should that grounding-screw also be wired to the common-ground discussed here, i.e. the same as my wrist-strap? (Also, why the hell is there two grounds on that, then; one as a screw, and one as the third prong in the power-cable?)
You can, but for your purposes, it probably won't help much. The safety ground for the chassis is part of the three prong cable. That lug is intended to be connected to a low impedance instrumentation ground. Such a ground will be at approximately the same potential as earth and likely on its own ground rod, but won't won't have all the noise of the building's main electrical safety ground. The safety and instrumentation grounds must be tied together at some point, by code. That is typically as close to the ground rods as possible.
Like Ali said, charge is a property (or characteristic or feature) of a particle. The particle could be an atom, or it could just be a part of an atom like an electron or a proton.
Unfortunately, we can't really say much about why particles have this property, or what causes this property to exist. We can only describe some things we observe about this property that we call charge.
Charge comes in two types, which we arbitrarily label as "positive" and "negative".
Positive charges repel each other with a force that we can measure, negative charges repel each other similarly, and opposite charges attract each other.
We find that there are components of atoms called "protons" and "electrons" that are always positively and negatively charged, respectively.
Charge is conserved. That means, in all the experiments we have tried, the difference between the amount of positive and negative charge in a closed system is the same at the end of the experiment as it was at the beginning of the experiment, and we therefore believe this is true of all closed systems in the universe.
Even though we don't know what charge is or where it originally comes from, the description of what it does is enough for us to predict lots of useful things and make lots of useful tools like radios and computers.
Best Answer
Let me make one thing clear: without actually making the blinking LED and the transistor amplifier and the diode steering circuit and the bistable miltivibrator you WILL NOT understand. You can't book learn this stuff, you need to get hands-on. You need to get a visceral understanding of what's going on; you need to identify when something's going wrong by touch and by smell.
Grab practically everything from Forrest M. Mims III; "Getting Started in Electronics" was my bible when I was learning this stuff. His Engineer's Mini-Notebooks were also gold. Robert Grossblatt was another author I frequently checked out from the local library.
Get a little breadboard, a resistor kit, a small capacitor kit and some diodes and transistors and start playing. It's the only way to learn. Spice is nice, but I have only found it useful once you have a half an idea of what's going on. Spice has a nasty nasty habit of lying to you and unless you have a decently-tuned bs detector when it comes to electronics, spice can really throw you for a loop. You mention a lack of space, but really this won't take up anything more than a small kitchen table when it's all out, and it'll pack away into a small box or briefcase when it's put away.
After that I'd start looking at an Arduino or Propeller chip to start your journey into microcontrollers. I've never used either but they're pretty much the de-facto standard when it comes to beginner microcontrollers. After that, jump right in to small ARM processors. Skip the PICs and AVRs; nothing beats using REAL gcc and REAL debuggers. If you really find yourself needing a small microcontroller for space or power reasons, THEN look to the PIC/AVR stuff, but not before looking at low power beauties like the MSP430.
I've developed industrial control equipment using the PICs and I've done my share of time on 68xx/z80/80186/80196 microcontrollers and even more with various DSPs and microprocessors. For a hobbyiest or someone trying to learn there really isn't any need to stray from what I'd mentioned above. Not unless you either want to learn a particular processor or need the specific features of one of them.
Above all, enjoy learning. Electronics is a lot of fun.