This is my favorite circuit book:

https://www.amazon.com/Analog-Circuit-Design-Personalities-E...

It is written from zen-level experts in a very ELI5 way. The examples start off with a naive approach, and step by step explain how they were improved, in some cases over decades.

Plus it focuses on how analog really is an art. Circuits have so many competing design parameters, and the canvas is so wide open, that it really takes a different kind of brain to approach the problem. This book gives a peak into that process in a comical, light-hearted way.

My canonical answer to this question for the last 2 decades+ has been The Radio Amateur's Handbook. It will take you from zero to basic electronics with a healthy dose of radio theory and it is eminently approachable. I haven't read an edition in years, so I don't know how much it's changed. My recommendation would be the pre 1995 editions. Usually easy to find at libraries, but not these days...

I think I also have this book https://www.amazon.com/Analog-Circuit-Design-Personalities-E...

Or some other similar book from Jim Williams. It's not as much about electronics as it is about the engineers who came up with interesting ideas and designs.

Which brings up another idea: google Analog Devices Analog Dialog. They put out this newsletter for like 50 years and it pretty much tells the history of precision analog design.

Yeah, I'm paid to program, but I'm still an old school analog circuit design pretender at heart :-)

For a practical understanding of electronics, there's no need to go so far deep into the theory that you'd get "lost in all the electrons". I really like HyperPhysics for the basic, basic theory - http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/emcon.html#emcon I would go through the Circuit Elements tree first, then the Electric Circuits. If you want to go further, there are tons of college courses with lecture notes available online. You're probably looking for something like an EE201/Electronic Circuits. Here's one I found that seemed to have all the important topics: http://tuttle.merc.iastate.edu/ee201/topics.htm Unfortunately, sometimes the lecture notes are hard to understand since they're not meant to be a standalone tutorial. You may also check MIT or Stanford for their free course versions, which probably have the entire lecture.

From there, to be honest, I'm not sure what to suggest. One thing I usually recommend to people interested in electronics is to pick up a breadboard kit/tutorial like one by Elegoo on Amazon. It's slightly more programming focused, but it covers a lot of other circuit topics and it's a great way to get started with experimentation. I find that being able to actually produce something as you're learning makes it a lot more engaging.

Art of Digital design is a 2nd or 3rd year college level textbook so you might be missing some context there. I would say if you want to go further, look into a transistor-level circuit course (which I took after EE201). That covered both analog and digital transistor circuits, which supported the digital design class I was taking at the same time.