Ask HN: Online Learning Resource for EE or Hardware

There are tons of sites and services cropping up primarily for web development or programming such as Udacity, Codecademy, etc... In addition to existing resources, OCW, books, etc...

There doesn't seem to be an equivalent for EE or Hardware related learning aside from going to school, hitting the books, etc... Please don't say "just dive right in". I whole-heartedly agree that the best way to learn is hands on but it would be nice to be able to have a solid format to go off of.

Background: I'm completely self taught. My entire background is completely on the programming side. I have pretty much little to no knowledge of where to even begin getting involved in hardware and all the resources I've looked into online are extremely vague and does not do a solid job breaking down things the way they do for programming and all the various things you need. For example, if you want to do web development, you'll need HTML, CSS, and Javascript on the front end (probably best in that order although not required), a choice of a backend language, etc... For hardware, there is a lot more working knowledge and I assume they build off each other, and its really hard to get any solid advice or a list of things in the order you need to learn them (short of going off some course cirriculum.

I get that there are things like the arduino and stuff out there and I've looked into it. But it doesn't really make the learning curve any easier to understand, or rather, what the heck am I suppose to learn in the first place. About the only thing I'm sure of right now is learning to solder and apparently starting with signals and counters. Can anyone break this down a bit better for me or provide better list of things I need to know, the order in which I need to learn them if there is knowledge that builds on top of another, etc...

I don't mind diving into books and doing whatever, I just need a general guideline if you will. Thanks.