Learning electronics is very, very difficult under the best of situations. You are asking us to make the exact perfect recommendation specific to you. This is not going to happen. It also would help if you loved the discipline and electronics in general.
I recommend that you watch Jeri Ellsworth's videos and also find videos about how she got to where she is and her history. Very revealing about the nature of learning difficult things, as she is completely self taught.
Hope this helps...
This is exactly the problem! Many of the respondents are engineers who spent 4 or 5 years in college learning this stuff. It was a LOT of work. Yet a newcomer wants to come along, grab a magic book and understand electronics without spending a similar amount of time. It ain't gonna happen! Sorry...
What we need to do is break the problem down with a first cut: Are we talking hobby level or are we talking engineering because there is a world of difference. Hobby level is pretty easy to deal with. Ohm's Law plus Kirchhoff's Laws should cover it. A hobbyist can go a long way knowing just these two ideas. OK, throw in Thevenin, it's pretty easy (except for figure 1.11 in Art of Electronics!). In the day to day hobby stuff I do, these are all I need and, really, it's only Ohm's Law that comes up all the time. It's only when I play around with Beginner's questions on circuit analysis that I need simultaneous equations and probably MATLAB (because I am lazy). Laplace and Fourier seldom come up (for me) except that there is a thread re: FFT going on right now.
Here is a list of the 15 Best Books and, sure enough, The Art of Electronics is at the top of the list.
https://www.electronicshub.org/electronics-books-beginners/You could try "Introduction to Electric Circuits" by Jackson. It's the book I had back in '70 for EE101 so it's old. It's a LOT slower than "Art of Electronics" which, I'll admit, covers a lot of territory in the first chapter.
Alibris has the Jackson book in Used, Paperback for as little as $2.98 and it's a much newer edition than my old hardback. It might be worth a few bucks just to see what the author has to say.
The math is generally very light but there's a problem: Once you start dealing with inductors and capacitors, you will necessarily be using derivatives like di/dt and dv/dt and, or exponentials like these (about half way down the page):
https://www.electronics-tutorials.ws/rc/rc_1.htmlThere's no way around it, this is the way capacitors work. Same for inductors...
Watch the Real Analog series at Digilent (link above) and see what you think. The instructor is very good and, from the videos I have watched, the explanations are clear and thorough.
Watch the Electrical Engineering series from Khan Academy
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/electrical-engineeringWhen you mess around with RC circuits, you are either designing a filter and will need to understand cutoff frequency, rolloff rate and Bode' Plots which are frequency domain concepts or you are designing an integrator (same thing, really) and you care about the time domain. It's amazing how the two domains tie together with a simple resistor and capacitor.
You can save a lot of money on books if you use the web resources. So, spend the money on the Digilent Analog Discovery 2, a few breadboards, some resistors, capacitors, inductors and transistors. Use a wall wart or battery pack and start building and analyzing circuits. Everything you could possibly need for circuit design and analysis is available in the AD2. That's why it is targeted at university students. It's a lab in a backpack (when you add in a laptop, of course). Build circuits, run some numbers, test to see if the real world is anything like the math. It isn't until you can correlate what you build with what you think that you get a real handle on electronics (or anything else).
I would have loved to have had something like the AD2 when I was in college. Alas, we were still using slide rules.
Here is Lecture 15 in the Real Analog series. See what you think, keeping in mind that 14 lectures precede this video and gloss over the calculus because it is the result that matters, not the derivation:
ETA: Yes, the math gets awkward when integral calculus isn't in your toolbox. I didn't post the link to show how bad things will get (because Maxwell's Equations are much worse) but just to show where the equations come from. You will need to know the result but not the derivation. Ignore the calculus, kick back and reflect on the deeper issues of how voltage and current are related in capacitive circuits. The very first day of studying AC circuits (which is the semester after DC circuits), all of this stuff comes up.
Go back and watch videos 1 through 4. The math is a lot more reasonable and lays the foundation for the stuff that follows.
https://learn.digilentinc.com/classroom/realanalog/I haven't watched every video in the series nor have I done any of the lab exercises (important!). If my grandson had chosen EE instead of ME, I would be more interested in the review.