Not sure about blogs, but I can recommend the book The Art of Electronics (Horowitz and Hill). It's very expensive, but worth every penny.

I'll second this book, but also recommend Grob's Basic Electronics. Also very expensive...

...but that last bit has a caveat: These books are only expensive if you opt for "the latest edition". If you are doing this at a hobby level (vs taking a dedicated college course or similar), purchasing an older edition will serve you just as well. Electronics haven't changed that much between today and when the book's prior revision was published (or the revision before that - or even 5+ revisions ago).

Most of the changes are likely going to be very small and minor errata (spelling mistakes most likely).

All that said, Art of Electronics doesn't appear too expensive, even for a current edition (provided you stay away from the academic hardcover version, I'd imagine). Grob's is on a different level price-wise, but again, you can find cheaper versions.

I'd also like to point out Forrest M. Mims III's "Engineer's Mini Notebooks" series as something to go along with the above two books as well (or alone, if you just want the quick-n-dirty hack-on-electronics thing). They were originally sold by Radio Shack back in the day, but today can be picked up via Mims' site (which I think just redirects to Amazon). Old "vintage" copies (the new version combine multiple notebooks into one) can also be had fairly cheaply. They don't go into as much depth as the earlier mentioned books, but they can prove to give a quick and good understanding of the basics (provided you consume them in the proper order of course).

But if you're serious about electronics, they can't substitute for the previous mentioned volumes; get those first, then get the Mims volumes later (IIRC, Mims did write a separate book on learning electronics - it's probably mentioned on his site).

The previous-edition "hack" you describe applies to many textbooks but Horowitz and Hill is a bit of a special case. The current edition is the 3rd, published in 2015. The 2nd edition is from 1989, and while a lot of the material is timeless (part of why the book has become a classic), as you can imagine, a lot has changed in the world of electronics since 1989 and therefore the update to the 3rd edition was widely anticipated for many years. By all means pick up a 2nd edition if you find one cheap, but it is a book where it's probably worthwhile to prefer the current edition if you have the means.

It's the bible for undergrand EE students. Highly recommend.

I love H&H but feel it is worth pointing out it is more of a handbook than an introductory electronics book. In particular it doesn't really aim to teach basic circuit analysis (although it does restate a fair bit, for the benefit of those like myself whose prior instruction covered all the theory but failed to instill good intuition). Unfortunately I don't have a solid recommendation for a true beginner's resource for electronics.

I have also been very awestruck by those PCB sleuths. Something about physical debugging that's very concrete, very tangible. Something about that effort tickles the human intellect in a very different way that I think is accessible to a lot of folks. I remember reading this article that posed some interesting questions in the realm of spy novels and all the physical shenanigans that spies can exploit in these magician like feats.

Here's the take home clinch for the story, "physical viscerality"...

I wonder about the future of the spy genre in our digital, post-historical era. The essence of espionage is information—specifically, information about the capabilities and intentions of friends and adversaries. The mechanics of this trade has always been the bread and butter of the spy thriller. The whole first half of Le Carré’s masterpiece Smiley’s People, for example, turns on the physical transportation of a single incriminating frame of negative film across national frontiers by couriers, several of whom end up dead. That was the analog world of the Cold War. Our digital world, in which the contents of the Library of Congress can be encrypted and transmitted across the globe with the touch of a key, is far less dramatic and does not lend itself as easily to romance. Kim Philby spent the better part of two decades transcribing the crown jewels of British and American intelligence secrets by hand and turning them over to the KGB. As current headlines attest, a single computer hack or anonymous leak today can yield a far bigger cache of secrets. Do spies still use dead drops? Brush passes? Microdots? Invisible ink? Do they still meet their contacts in smoky cafes and secluded parks? Many of these gritty noir devices may have been retired and replaced by banks of computer screens in the sub-basements of Northern Virginia office parks. All of which makes the spy genre poorer and more antiseptic. We are left with stylish but vapid movies about superheroes like Jason Bourne, pursued by cartoonish CIA assassins.

The digital world also changes our perceptions of political crime, of which espionage is a sub-species. Without the physical Watergate break-in and the amateur-hour rifling through DNC file cabinets, there would have been no scandal. In contrast, the political scandals of the last election cycle seem mired in the geek-squad arcana of passwords, servers, and hard drives. They lack the visceral physicality of Watergate, which is why they are unlikely to amount to much, despite the wishes of political partisans. https://www.city-journal.org/html/alan-fursts-world-spies-15...