Ask HN: What's the *second* Arduino book?

A bit of context: I was playing with Arduino for a while (got the SparkFun starter kit), and it was all good until I hit the third tutorial circuit, which involved a diode and a transistor and a few other things.

The point is... I couldn't make the circuit work. AFAICT, everything was plugged in correctly, and as I decomposed the circuit to understand more of what was going on, incremental pieces worked, but the whole thing just didn't work at all.

What I think I need is the second Arduino book. Some kind of "Debugging Circuits for Dummies" course/lecture/video/book/thingie that doesn't start out with "First, take two years of basic circuits and do all the exercises in Horowitz and Hill."

How have other people solved the "I'm playing with Arduino, starting from the vague rudiments of electronics knowledge, and I'm stuck." problem?