I highly recommend this book. The first practical lesson, as I recall, has you short-circuit a battery and destroy an LED. It's great to learn the limits of typical components this way, and it takes away the fear of breaking stuff. It's written simple enough to be followed by a child, but I had a blast going through it as a physics grad student who knew electrodynamics and very little electronics.

The first two editions had quite a few errata, but there is an online page for them:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9780596153748...