The Art of Electronics is a wonderful book and you can certainly learn from it. I don't think it's useful as a reference, but it is a little opaque to someone new.

But, now there is https://learningtheartofelectronics.com/ Learning the Art of Electronics, which is a practical course with labs to complete, etc. It is very, very good. I am using subsets of it (with scaffolding/additional practice) to teach smart middle schoolers to design transistor circuits implementing amplifiers, oscillators, and logic gates.