I don't disagree on the quality of these manuals (see my other comment), but for a beginner, The Art of Electronics is a very bad choice.

TAE is great if you've gone through university-level courses, understood (or at least was able to reproduce) the math but can't grok transistors without diagrams and formulae and know next to nothing about design principles.

For someone with no prior exposure, it's a terrible book. It explains very little about why things are the way they are.

Rules of thumb are great when you know what's behind them. When you don't, it's a shaky bridge to walk on.