Not being familiar with the Dummies series, I don't know their style, but you should try to avoid frustration by starting with simple circuits that reinforce the basics that you have to learn along the way. For example, when I started out, I had to learn Ohm's law, which is by far the most useful bit of math in electronics. To help understand it, we started by building circuits with only batteries, lamps, switches, and especially resistors. This doesn't allow you to build very many really interesting things, but you do get to learn ohm's law inside out. Once you've got resistors and batteries and switches figured out, you move on to capacitors, inductors and other "passive" devices, but avoid transistors for now. Then, once you've mastered all those bits, you can move on to transistors.
Hey, I know this sounds kind of boring, but this is the path you would likely take if you took a course on electronics at a school. They really want you to understand ohm's law quite thoroughly before attacking semiconductor stuff.
This doesn't mean you can't build other projects in the meantime, but it does give some structure so that you can learn and not get totally frustrated. Structure is important because there is so much to learn that it scares a lot of beginners away and that is too bad.