I'd recommend you to read up on the Austrian School of Economics. A rather easy introduction is this: http://mises.org/books/econforrealpeople.pdf More advanced: http://mises.org/rothbard/mes.asp and http://mises.org/Books/HumanActionScholars.pdf

I took quite a few economics courses in university - and all of the textbooks were poor.

The best course was on monetary policy, basically the type of modeling and process the Federal Reserve or the Bank of Canada go through.

Check out http://www.stanford.edu/~johntayl/MacroPolicyWorld.htm