Well, community, I imagine there's a lot of hardware inclined programmers who understand many of the aspects of development of various electronic devices hiding around here. I've been programming for almost a decade now, but I've never got around to actually studying and/or experimenting with developing small electronics and that is something that interests me greatly these days, so if someone could point me in the right direction... Perhaps a good collection of books? Although I can say Math and Physics are my friends, I'd like to take small steps and gradually go from there. If I've learned anything from programming, it's the "don't rush it" principle. So, any help would be greatly appreciated!

Read everything you can from this guy http://www.forrestmims.com/ (luckily, he's a very entertaining writer)

Agreed, those books are great. Also look into open source hardware platforms, such as the Arduino, which is great for a programmer-oriented person to get started in electronics. I assume you probably don't have the necessary equipment yet, so you'll need the following bare minimum gear: A prototyping bread board, a multimeter, and a power supply (+/- 5V and +/-12 V, centre tapped). The EEVblog youtube channel has some good tips on what equipment to buy (if you can endure the dude's voice... hahah), but that is probably for the more advanced.

If you have no exposure (like I did), you could go get one of those hobby electronic kits from Radio Shack. I learned a lot and had a pretty fun time with it.

Not exactly beginner friendly code, but it was my first proper and large electronics project: check out my midi controller project. The source code is available on Github now, in case you want to take a peek. Perhaps you can learn something from it or maybe it will inspire you. In any case, feel free to contact me if you have any specific (or not so specific) questions and I'll be happy to help.