Even before you said this, I was going to recommend the Radio Amateur's Handbook. https://www.amazon.com/arrl-handbook/s?k=arrl+handbook
Get an old one and save money. I haven't looked at it in probably 20 years and it was an amazing reference even back then. The theory of electronics doesn't change and this book does a great job of taking you from basic theory to designing complex circuits.
There's also Horowitz & Hill's The Art of Electronics which some swear by. I probably read the ARRL handbook cover to cover in high school, so I'm biased :-)
Yeah. In practice, a lot of (programming or electronics) education skips the intermediate step and assumes a certain amount of imagination in pattern-matching a solution out of the available pieces.
There's a certain amount of design information scattered about in "Application notes", which are produced by IC manufacturers who want you to use a particular IC and therefore suggest a bunch of stuff you might want to do with it. The largest of these, which is basically a full course on op-amps, and has a slightly legendary status, is Linear Technology Application Note 47. https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/appl...
I found Ben Eater's 8-bit breadboard computer project incredibly helpful in grokking both low-level computers and the electronic theory. https://eater.net/
I also highly recommend the channels bigclive, ave, eebvlog, Louis Rossman, and electroboom.
For podcasts, I've found The Amp Hour and Embedded.fm to be invaluable. There's also Contextual Electronics if you want a more Udemy-style experience.
As a fun toy, I recently picked up Upperstory's Spintronics (https://upperstory.com/spintronics/), which provides an excellent way to grok oscillators and transistors mechanically. You might do well to start there.
The best training I got, though, was sitting next to an EE as he troubleshot hos own designs. Anything you can do to get that experience - meetups, conferences, HAM events, etc. is absolute gold.
Best of luck in your adventures pushing electrons around!
Mostly because, rightly I'm sure, they discuss the individual components, or subsystems common to electronics: what's a capacitor, what's a resistor, what's an oscillator, what's an amplifier.
But where they break down, for me, is they don't put it all together. It's like having your introduction to computers being nothing more than a book on data structures and algorithms.
All important, fundamental concepts, but how do you get from an algorithm and data structure book to writing your own Rogue game, which uses all of those things.
I've never found a book or other treatise that puts it all together, at least for me. Mind, I've never had any formal training. I took an electronics class in 9th grade which basically studied Ohms law and other fundamentals, and at the end I assembled an AM radio transmitter, but I had no idea how that transmitter worked, what choices were made and why, etc. It was just a kit, and more a testament of soldering and assembly skills than anything else. Same with all of those old Radio Shack kits that they used to sell.
I need a "design your own radio" course or something that works from the top down "here's a radio, here's the structure, here's how we work on each part of that, stitch them together, why use this transistor vs that one".