Circuit Reference Handbook

I'm not an EE, but here are a few, portable ones.

Amazon.com: Pocket Book of Electrical Engineering Formulas ...Electrical engineering; a pocket reference.(Brief article)(Book ..Newnes Electrical Pocket Book Newnes Pocket Books: Amazon.co.uk .Electrical Engineering: A Pocket Reference - Heinz Schmidt-Walter

Pocket Book of Electrical Engineering Formulas, Richard C. Dorf ...

Perhaps a real EE can guide you.

The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill is highly recommended.

What I do is frequent my local used books store, and to a lesser extent, eBay, and buy up electronics books. I have them from as old as 1880 to the present. You'll often find the best information in an older book - for instance, if you're interested in transistor circuit analysis or design, you can't beat the books that were written in the 1960s.

Another, more casual, book that I highly recommend is Practical Electronics for Inventors.

Man, my 1880 book is woefully short on transister theory and solid state circuit diagrams.

But I'll bet it's long on actual electrical theory.

I have a 1920 radio book that shows you how to build a radio transmitter, with no electronic devices at all (vacuum tubes are covered in the second half of the book). You build a capacitor out of tin foil and glass plates, a transformer with a winding apparatus he describes, and you generate your high voltage RF with a rotary spark gap (something very like a old style car distributor). By tuning the secondary of the transformer to the frequency of interest, the high voltage generated by the sparking of the gap is converted to an oscillation that is transmitted out the antenna.

It's fascinating stuff.

But, if it's transistors you want, try Transistor Electronics, by Lo, Endres, Zawels, Waldhauer & Cheng, of RCA Labs, published in 1955.

I was being silly in my answer. There were no practical electronic devices prior to the first transistor invented at Bell labs in 1948.

There were almost none:

ca - 1930.

Fink has been the standard for years. http://www.amazon.com/Standard-Handbook-Electrical-Engineers-Donald/dp/0071441468

Try this: http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_1/index.html

Electrical Engineers Handbook; Khanna Publishers, New Delhi, India. Covered all required.

Encyclopedia of Electronic Circuits by Rudolf Graf. I have Series 1-5 and they cover almost everything. Got them on eBay.