Whoo electronics. You say you have a meter so that is a start (sometimes you might want two though but one will be enough to start with).
You might also consider a breadboard (normally white coloured plastic with loads of holes for wires and components) which can make building stuff a bit easier.
MIT have an open course that does for high level stuff as well as the general capacitance, resistance, current, voltage.... equations. They even have video lectures in real format (grab a copy of real alternative from
http://www.free-codecs.com/ if you do not have want real installed)
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engin...ience/index.htm
I also suggest learning the symbols and bsic terminology used: get a GCSE/high school physics/electronics book/revision site and go with that. What is e.m.f, p.d., ohms law, Kirchoff's laws, capacitance, resistance, resistivity (and the three components thereof) and detail the main equations these concepts are needed in.
Something to bear in mind:
Current direction: pick one and stick with it for a given problem (the US did and still often does assume current goes from positive terminals to ground/negative but in fact electron direction is negative to positive and most of the rest of the world uses this. Can pose a problem if you mix problems together
I also perhaps may go as far as saying there are 4 main schools of electronics:
digital
Where the world is heading it seems, if you went to a university to do electronics this is what you would likely spend most of your time doing.
This area is normally geared towards building things from from the other areas to perform some task: major areas include logic gates and stuff like shift registers and processor design.
Overlaps somewhat with computing and thus is well explained in the art of assembly:
http://webster.cs.ucr.edu/
analog(ue)
motors, solenoids, actuators, relays, circuit design, arrays of capacitors and the like. This is more your traditional electronics but is the bread and butter of the electronics world. Learn it and learn it well as everything stems from it and ultimately leads back to it.
materials:
Tends to focus on how to make electronics better in given environments
Should I grow a layer of silicon on a substrate larger than it but make it thin it will be strained and in turn make a transistor change quicker.
My last go at research was fuel cells and how to make them conduct better internally (which at a 1000 degrees C for several months with a nice presence of hydrogen and oxygen is easier said than done).
real world: should someone call themselves an electrician this is likely what they do. It tends to involve wiring sockets, power supplies for buildings, generators and some stuff in cars.
