It's not just choosing the right nominal value and key parameters for that resistor, capacitor, or inductor (the three leading categories of passives) that is critical; you also have to worry about secondary specifications, construction details, and other subtleties. A carbon-composition, 50 Ω, ½ W resistor is not the same as a thin-film device with the same apparent, top-level specifcations; there are issues of temperature coefficient (tempco), surge withstand, size, and other less-obvious but still vital factors.

In order to give some "air time" to passives (to use an old, quaint phrase) we've looked over our many design articles published here and at sibling sites in the past few years and picked some that have rated highly among readers, as measured by page views and their "long tail"–one undeniable aspect of passives as a category is that so much of the information about them is valid and valuable for a relatively long time, compared to active components.

Some of these articles focus on the passive component itself, while others are about getting the most when using the particular component in a design. Here are the ones you found worth your time (they not shown in any sort of rank order, BTW):

• "The elegance of ferrite beads as a circuit design and problem-solving component"
• "Power Tip: Don't get burned by inductor core losses"
• "Fainting in Coils: Filters and their Inductors"
• "When a solution is the solution, or: when an old dog meets an old dummy (load)"
• "Choosing the right input caps for your buck converter"
• "Power Tip: Snubbing the forward converter"
• "Power Tip #4: Damping an Input Filter--Part 2 of 2"
• "Power Tip #17: Snubbing the Flyback Converter"
• "A Practical Look at Current Ratings "
• "Choosing and Using Bypass Capacitors (Part 1 of 3)"
• "Choosing and Using Bypass Capacitors (Part 2 of 3)"
• "Choosing and Using Bypass Capacitors (Part 3 of 3)"
• "A bypass-capacitor dialogue peels back the layers, Part 2: The theory of ground relativity"
• "A bypass-capacitor dialogue peels back the layers, Part 1: The theory of ground relativity"