I learned a lot about the basics with "Getting started in Electronics" by Forrest M. Mims III, it's very (very) accessible and I find the drawings very amusing.
Or else you have the Bible of the trade, or "The Art of Electronics" by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill that just came out for a third edition. It's an incredibly comprehensive guide but you'd better have some free time ahead if you want to read through it all :)
Agree with you. The Forrest Mims books are concise and written in a very simple manner without dumbing things down. His collection of the basics which is about four small volumes, will cost you about $50 in total. Money very well spent.
I can recommend Practical Electronics for Inventors. It is very helpful in getting practical prototypes designed pretty quick. I sometimes still refer to it when I need something simple I haven't designed in a while.
1. Contextual Electronics does have a really good course on kicad.
2. Kicad is a very good PCB software package.
Word of warning though, kicad is currently in a state of "flux" with the latest stable from 2013, and the bleeding edge versions having all of the features you want to use. I personally use nightly builds and the 2013 version quite often, and neither are what I would call professionally stable.
One cool thing about the new version is that it uses s-expressions for its file format. I was disappointed to find that I couldn't perform rotation on a group of footprints at once, but once I took a look at the file format I found it was easy to load into Racket, do a little trig, and spit out the rotated forms: https://github.com/technomancy/atreus/blob/master/atreus.rkt...
Or else you have the Bible of the trade, or "The Art of Electronics" by Paul Horowitz and Winfield Hill that just came out for a third edition. It's an incredibly comprehensive guide but you'd better have some free time ahead if you want to read through it all :)