Starting with Tikz, why the arrow is not drawn?

I started learning Tikz using the Tikz PGF manual and so far everything has been very intuitive and easy to follow.

When learning about commands I decided to do a simple test:

\begin{tikzpicture}
\draw[fill] (0,0) circle (2pt) -- (4,0) circle (2pt) -- (8,0) circle (8,0);
\end{tikzpicture}


And that returns the expected three circles joined by a line

Now, I wanted those three circles joined by a line with an arrow so I changed the code to be like this:

\begin{tikzpicture}
\draw[->] (0,0) circle (2pt) -- (4,0) circle (2pt) -- (8,0) circle (2pt);
\end{tikzpicture}


But my surprise, the three circles are joined by a line but without an arrow tip!

I tried using the [arrows=->] option and nothing. I noticed as well the lines are getting up to the center of the circle, not outside, what am I doing wrong? what did I misunderstand?

Thanks a lot for your help to this Tikz noob :)

• Welcome! The last path in the path is a circle. At which point should the arrow be attached in your opinion? There is no arrow because in \draw[-stealth] (0,0) circle[radius=1cm]; there is also no arrow.
– user194703
Apr 13 '20 at 19:50
• Thanks @Schrödinger'scat your comment was enough to see my mistake! Tikz doesn't know where the circle starts or end so I tried again with a node instead of a circle (in reality a node drawn with a circle) and that made the trick. Apr 14 '20 at 11:26

@OP: You are right about this "... everything has been very intuitive and easy to follow", and leraning by testing is surely a good way. However, TikZ has its own features that you need to be famimilar with: node, style, +, ++, ...

Here is what I guess you might want to archive. Hope you enjoy with TikZ!

\documentclass[tikz,border=5mm]{standalone}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\foreach \i in {0,1,2}
\path (4*\i,0) node (A\i) [circle,draw=red,minimum size=2pt]{};

\draw[->] (A0)--(A1);
\draw[->] (A1)--(A2);
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}