Newbie starting out with electronics.

[AlexT]

Good evening everyone! I recently started out building my own "workshop" at home after about 3 or so years of telecommunications studies at my highschool.But, since the educational system in my country is really "down in the dumps" I didn't do so much practical stuff.Just theory and theory...ahh.My mind exploded.
I guess that theory is going to help me later on, but I lack some real basic things you get from working with electronical equipment.I just bought myself a soldering iron, a breadboard, a couple of basic and multicoloured LED's as well as the most expensive part of my toolkit, my Arduino board.
Since I will be heading towards a polytechnics faculty, and will become a major in this field I'm already studying, I would like to "get my hands" dirty and actually start designing boards, circuits and learning some embedded software languages.
What tools/software should I start collecting?I'm guessing C/C++ is the language to go, right?
Thanks alot for your time!

PS: Please excuse my grammar mistakes since english isn't my main language

[septer012]

I highly suggest you write simple C programs, then read the disassembly language until you understand the basics of the language that way you can debug harder programs on a broader range of boards without actually just starting with assembly.  Check out sparkfun.com for guides and (expensive) but handy electronics and hackaday.com for inspiration.