I must become even more of a madman. I will use this book (on my handyman wishlist)
Using the knowledge of arduino i will build a fighting giant robot.
I was mostly self-taught(so your mileage may vary), but a really fun and useful way to start, especially if you're interested in programming for embedded systems and robots and such is to get a basic Arduino board, which comes with a free software development environment, build some of the projects in this book