Official Arduino Starter Kit [K000007] - 12 DIY Projects with Electronic Components & English Projects Book - Original Kit from Italy

It's not hard to get started. Pick up Make: Electronics to learn the basics by example. Each chapter walks you through a project that teaches some important concepts. http://www.amazon.com/Make-Electronics-Discovery-Charles-Pla...

And to get started with Arduino, you can simply buy a starter kit: http://www.amazon.com/Arduino-Starter-Official-170-page-Proj...

I actually think it's easier for most people to get started with electronics than with code. This is coming from someone with 13 years coding experience and who has only been working on hobby electronics for the past 2 years.

Electronics projects don't have the same amount of boilerplate you see with writing code today. Development tools, frameworks, dependency management, the commandline, polyglot projects etc hinder a lot of beginners at the start. I would say you need to read 900 pages before you can fully understand everything that goes into developing a trivial CRUD website. With electronics, you just plug in and start learning. Learn the functions of a lot of different components and then come up with something that uses them together. Ohm's law is most of what you /need/ to know to design a basic circuit. You can derive what you need with the help of V=IR e.g. voltage dividers, components in series, parallel. And you need to learn how to read schematics and datasheets.

The theory behind everything you do is deep if you want to venture into electromagnetism, which is IMO deeper than what you would expect from college level CS. But it's not necessary to have a deep understanding of it in practice. Though you could say the same about a lot of software engineering and its relation to CS. :)