user?id=taneq was contrasting "electronic design" with the mathematical approach, so not sure which one you want.
The ur-book for EE is Horowitz and Hill's The Art of Electronics. It can be found online with a little scrounging or for $100+ on amazon. H&H is extremely dense, fairly comprehensive and more like a handbook than an introduction. If you are very math-oriented maybe it will work for you, but be warned that this is over a thousand pages of formulas, greek letters, graphs, and subscripts and superscripts. It's... taxing.
As for a higher-level friendly introduction like taneq was talking about, there are a ton of resources that all cover small but essential parts. Unfortunately that means a ton of repeating things and difficulty in bringing everything together. Arduino resources are great, the adafruit/sparkfun articles/blogs are great, whitepapers from TI and others are great. I don't know of a single atlas to bring these together or say them in a single place, which sucks. I may try giving it a shot- I'm certainly math-dumb enough to understand how to translate.
The EEVblog and sparkfun youtube channels are excellent, particularly for PCB design. IMO PCB design is essential to transition from tinkering to a true hobby. Most sophisticated components only come in PCB-only packages. PCBs are far cheaper than breadboards, and mandatory for any project with more than a dozen parts. PCBs make debugging far easier. They're required for anything operating over a few MHz, and most digital stuff. Unfortunately the software still kind of blows- Kicad is the best, but still a huge pain.
I can't recommend electronics enough as a hobby! It's more intense than brewing beer, but the scene has blown up exponentially in the past two decades and is incredibly accessible. Electronics are more affordable than any other engineering discipline- PCBs are simple and incredibly cheap to order in single lots, and 80% of components can be ordered in single units. Compare eg metal prices, which are easily 20% the price in bulk vs. small units. Single electronic components are 75-50% of the cost in bulk. Entire industries are dedicated to making cheap, simple modules that handle incredibly sophisticated tasks like location tracking, video, wireless communication, or battery power. You can do anything you can think of.
Lots of great points, but perhaps a bit unfair to AoE. As madengr says, the math gets way worse than what's in AoE.
AoE isn't really supposed to be a textbook in itself. It was written for physics students, typically at the graduate level, who need to design experimental apparatus without a formal engineering background. It's not an ideal introduction for newbies, and unfortunately it's recommended for that role way too often IMO. But it's a great sophomore resource, so to speak.
What's needed is something between the Forrest Mims "cookbook" level and AoE... something that gives you the theoretical underpinnings needed to know what chapter in AoE to turn to. People who are interested in the RF and communicstions side have always had the ARRL Handbook as a resource, but that book has limited appeal to those who are more interested in microcontrollers and other electronics topics. This page looks like it might make a useful contribution there.
That's exactly what I mean by math-oriented- it's good for people who understand things in terms of equations. If that's all you need to be comfortable, it's great and you can very quickly find what you want to know. That's what makes it good as a reference handbook.
Ha ha, "If you are very math-oriented maybe it will work for you". The AOE is definitely not math oriented, and not what is typically used for EE courses. If AOE was used for undergrad EE, then 2/3 wouldn't flunk out. Don't get me wrong, it's a good book, but it's definitely not for the math oriented.
