Spend $125 on Horowitz and Hill’s The Art of Electronics, 3rd Edition. It’s the last electronics text you’ll ever need.
1) At the level you can understand it, you don't need it. There are better, more in-depth, shorter books.
1) At the level you can't, it's incomprehensible. You'll run into a brick wall.
It's hard to recommend something without knowing background, but to do electronics well, you need to know basic linear algebra and differential equations, and understand (at least on a cursory level) the Laplace domain. You also need to be comfortable with poles, zeros, and rational functions.
That's a high bar. The most common mistake I see is trying to get further without being over that bar. Below that, you have popular books, many cartoonish, which explain what voltage and current are and the basic components. That's enough to do some basic Arduino projects and robotics, but not really get what's going on more deeply.
Above that bar, there are much more in-depth and theoretical approaches one is ready for the Art of Electronics.
Horowitz and Hill tries to compress that stuff down, toss in a bunch of oddball topics, and it doesn't really work.
Someone in the thread mentioned it was designed for physicists. It might be okay there. That's a kind of unique background where someone might understand the theory without the application. However, most of the time I've seen it used, it's a recipe for frustration.
brilliant.org has decent courses on linear algebra, including nodal analysis ($100/year or so). You don't need to know a lot; you do need to know how to express a linear equation as a matrix and solve with row reduction, and eventually, how to apply that to nodal analysis.
alcumus and AoPS textbooks are pretty adequate for rational functions, complex numbers, roots-of-unity, etc. You should know everything in their intermediate algebra and precalculus textbook (and ideally, their title textbooks: AoPS Volume 1 and 2). These aren't too long, are much more advanced than normal high school curricula, and are worth doing in either case, skipping the parts you know. Next step is something like MIT 6.302 OCW, which is brilliant.
For differential equations and Laplace, any differential equations textbook will be adequate. I would not do a deep dive here. A shallow one will more than suffice. If you kind-of-get-it, that's good enough.
If you lack calculus background for this dive, OSU MOOCulus or AoPS Calculus are good places to go. OSU will be easy, step-by-step, and AoPS will be challenging, so it depends on your background.
For most people, this takes 2-4 years, and you can't really cram it (which is both good and bad news; a little time each day is almost as good as learning full-time here; you can read about the spacing effect).
It's probably only good for a beginner with like 180 IQ. You can cover weeks of material in 5 pages, and it's well over 1000 pages total.
I'm an electrical engineer and I own a dozen or so textbooks for referencing. I don't even use AoE for referencing because it's so dense.
There are known caveats to the general idea (Nash equilibrium, Hotellings's law) but I'm just trying to point out that even despite the general correctness, there are people who are very heavily vertically integrated. And you would in fact expect those people to exist, because local minima are a fact of reality and you need people to understand larger parts in order to see past local phenomena.
'Ars Longa, Vita Brevis'[2] is a well-liked post that is in line with what you're describing. It's a bit funny, because the weak form argument (specialization is generally good) is totally obvious and there's basically no way to attack it. Specialization is the thing that has made society possible, and if anything it's more effective now than it was at the invention of simple tools. But the strong form requires some pretty specific assumptions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil [2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
“Make: Electronics” by Charles Platt and "Practical Electronics for Inventors" are both good practical recommendations. What to prefer really depends on your background. I'd add "Electronic Devices" by Thomas L. Floyd if you prefer more academic/systematic approach.
I read Electronics for Inventors, and have even pushed myself through respectable chunks of AoE, but Platt’s book really helped to drive home some concepts and spans a mere 350 pages.
You’re right: AoE is a rough sled as a brand new electronics learner.
I use AoE as a reference, but I’ve read full chapters from time to time when I’ve worked on relevant projects. I’ve never done an end to end read. Maybe I will when I retire lol.
I want to set aside time to read chapter 5 at some point. The precision electronics chapter is supposed to be bomb. Culminates in a design review of the autoranging circuit of one of the common handheld DMMs.
I shudder to think what will happen if youtube closes or radically changes operation. It will be even worse than burning the library of alexandria
That said, I bought “Learning the Art of Electronics: A Hands-On Lab Course” and really like it. There’s a good bit of practical, accessible knowledge there. Imho worth checking out for anyone who likes the idea of TAoE but finds it just a bit deep.
FWIW, my formal education is CS with a dose of digital electronics thrown in. For anything analog, I’ll try and find existing circuits close to what I need.