I am an electrical and computer engineering technologist and an electronics hobbyist and have read many electronics text books and hobby books. By far my favourite is the freely available NEETS - Navy Electrical and Electronic Training Series http://artikel-software.com/blog/2006/10/11/neets-navy-electrical-and-electronics-training-series/ These 24 well written modules cover an immense amount of material and take you from the most basic concepts of matter and energy through basic electronics to solid state electronics, operational amplifiers, filters, power supplies, oscillators, schematic reading, motors, wireless communication, digital electronics and even into low level computing. This would be my desert island reference because it really would be the only thing you would need even if you had never even heard of electronics. And they are free! Can't go wrong.

Physical Computing and also Making Things Talk are two fun ones from Tom Igoe. Making Things talk is mostly microcontroller (mostly Arduino ie AVR) but Physical Computing has lots of basic stuff in it as well as microcontrollers.