The Art of Electronics is a great reference guide and there is also a workbook(https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Art-Electronics-Hands-Course...) and student guide (https://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Student-Manual/dp/052...) that you can buy as a companion books. It can be dense at times though.

I highly recommend the Student Guide to the Art of Electronics: http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Electronics-Student-Manual/dp/...

The book covers the basics of both analog and digital, and focuses on developing intuition without getting _too_ bogged down by theory, with accompanying labs/projects. I took the course taught by the author of the book before going to school to study the same subject area, and it helped me develop intuition and general electronics knowledge in a way no other course has.

If you want preview of the book, e-mail me and I can send you some scans.

That's closer to it although a little sparse by the looks. Possibly a very short introductory course.

If asked, I tend to direct people towards the following books:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Electronics-Student-Manual/dp/...

Note: you need both the student manual (which most people don't know exists) and The Art Of Electronics.

To cover the maths background required, I recommend:

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Birth-Numbers-Jan-Gullberg...

They are not cheap but worth it.

Oh and a calculator. Any old cheap scientific (Casio/TI/HP) will do as long as it doesn't make errors.

The big problem for me was the maths initially. It doesn't take long before you hit a brick wall at the age of 12. My 10 year old daughter is learning algebra and programming (in python!) though at school so things are looking up.

You could read Petzold's book "Code - The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software"

(http://www.charlespetzold.com/code/)

Or the Art of Electronics Student Manual, which goes through the process of building a computer.

(http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Art-Electronics-Student-Manual/d...)

One thing that really helped me was getting a circuit diagram for a simple 8 bit computer, and then creating a memory map by tracing the address lines and writing what numbers were needed to enable addressing or not. Uh, I've done a really poor job of explaining this. Wikipedia does slightly better - (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory-mapped_I/O) but there must be something even better than that.

These slides have the limitation of being slides, but they seem (at first glance) to be pretty good.

(http://research.cs.tamu.edu/prism/lectures/mbsd/mbsd_l16.pdf)

I love stuff like this. I really hope keen engineering youth are able to get involved with building toy CPUs. Maybe not that complex, but enough to grasp what memory mapping and registers actually are.

Anyone interested could read either: (http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...) {the intro is too gentle for too long, then bamm it's too hard for many people.}

(http://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Student-Manual/dp/0521...) the student lab manual for the art of electronics. Probably best with AoE, which is showing its age but still excellent.

You do know that there is a companion hands-on lab book for AofE, right? http://www.amazon.com/Art-Electronics-Student-Manual-Exercis...

The ARRL handbook is also a very practical intro text, but quite broad.

[edit] Oh, another decent book that's aimed at technician level students: Electronic Principles by Malvino. I've got an older edition from my high school days, and it's a real easy read with lots of explanation of transistor circuits. http://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Principles-Albert-Malvino/d...