In practice, you'll find that the "discrete components" (official term for the miscellaneous things that aren't ICs) are also making up modules - that is, they're used as parts of standard recognisable sub-systems to perform a particular function. Such as "decoupling capacitor", "termination resistor", "common emitter amplifier", "pi filter" and so on.
I don't think you can really "cookbook" without knowing any theory, but the amount of theory you need is fairly small and you don't necessarily need all the maths.
"The Art Of Electronics" is the standard book to refer people to.
Respectfully, Art Of Electronics is not a great choice for OP. AOE is a deep dive with a fast, steep learning curve and while appropriate for a serious student (EE?) I would argue it's not appropriate for someone who has no fundamentals and wants to learn to glue major components together. OP needs to learn practical fundamentals in a hands-on fashion -- debouncing a switch or a purpose of a pull-down/up resistor (and how to calculate values), converting signal levels, etc.
We forget how steep the learning curve can be and how likely it is to turn students away when every page is a baffling struggle focused on topics with purposes which are not germane / not clearly related to the learner's wants. AOE is the equivalent of a music theory book for someone who wants to play "happy birthday." Or Knuth's series for a beginning coder.
Try instead Practical Electronics for Inventors, which is approachable if you remember Pre-Calculus. It covers a lot of basic stuff, explains how all the different parts work, and is a wonderful reference for someone who just wants to build some basic stuff. We had a copy of it in our Physics electronics lab next to AOE and as undergraduates we were more likely to reach for it than for AOE.
That was the book for my first electronics class in college and I found it awesome. I still reference it when doing hobby projects or the random time I get to work with electronics at work.
The workbook is definitely worth it to help make the book more concrete
To add onto this, if you want to quickly see many visual example explanations for these things, go to Google image search and choose type = Animated to get instant visualizations of the processes going on/principles demonstrated
I don't think you can really "cookbook" without knowing any theory, but the amount of theory you need is fairly small and you don't necessarily need all the maths.
"The Art Of Electronics" is the standard book to refer people to.