   What's a good book to get started with electronics?
  I'm looking for a good introductory book on electronics. I'd like to be able to understand and design circuits for basic stuff, as a hobby, but I'm not sure where to get started.I have just about finished my bachelor's degree in physics, and I took a one semester laboratory electronics course, but it was so fast paced that I didn't feel like I had time to really deeply understand a lot of it.I've heard that "The Art of Electronics" is really the bible for this sort of thing, but I'm not sure if I should start with it, because a lot of reviews say it's too dense for a sole introductory text. On the other hand, I don't want to get something that's totally patronizing either.Any suggestions?   
Electronics Explained by M.W. Brimicombe is an excellent book, though it'll be rather expensive thanks to it being an A Level textbook.   ;  I highly recommend this book:Getting Started in ElectronicsA few of the engineers at my office swear by the Forrest M Mims books.  I just bought this one myself and I've learned a ton in the few pages I've made it through so far.   ;  You can download Digital Works and play around with a circuit simulator & logic gates.;  http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/This site has several PDF books on DC and AC power, semiconductors, and digital circuits. It's a lot of reading if you want to start from the ground up.   ;Fundamentals of Electric Circuits I've heard is a good book. I had this one Electric Circuits, it sucks majorly in the beginning (aka the fundamentals) but becomes more useful in the later chapters in my opinion.From there, for diodes and transistors, Microelectronic Circuit Design seems pretty good, plenty of examples and derivations, it also has stuff on amplifier design. This one, Microelectronic Circuits, is also recommended by others.For some nonlinear stuff, the later chapters of both Design with Operational Amplifiers and Analog Integrated Circuits and Design of Analog CMOS Integrated Circuits have some info how some nonlinear circuits work. The opamp book has some pretty good stuff in general and do recommend, while CMOS book is only maybe good for some of the nonlinear stuff unless you actual went into industry doing this kind of stuff.The Art of Electronics book is dense for the beginner plus I don't recommend getting it because there should be an updated version out in a year or two. By then you should have a nice grasp of the fundamentals for the AoE book to be useful.Those books should help you with any analog circuit design, as for digital, I don't know, I'm finishing up my EE degree in analog/RF while digital I'll learn over the summer (the tools for digital are much cheaper than analog/RF).   