[kurthr]

I didn't get a degree in EE although I've done quite a bit of it. I really liked The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill, which has an associated lab book you could use for little projects. It covers a lot of real world issues that are missing from the more ideal academic books.

Also, I'd mention that the use of cgs in Purcell can be a bit annoying as you move on (it's very physics based) since most constants (permittivity, dielectrics, etc) are usually in mks instead. Those are used in the EE books.

One thing you will definitely want to learn is SPICE for simulation (any real job will probably be using Spectre or something built into your tool set), and luckily there are quite a few free ones. I'd recommend LTSpice for simple projects. Similarly there are "free" tools for building and testing FPGAs for the digital simulation side.

[selimthegrim]

There are newer versions of Purcell.