Then you must know a great deal more about programming than I do, If your experience is with programming on PCs I suggest you think carefully about the need to be very economical when you have only 2k of SRAM.
As far as the electronics and hardware is concerned I am entirely self-taught (if you could call it teaching) and I am a lot less confident with electronics than I am with programming. To my mind the scope is so enormous that it may be easier to identify a project and then learn what is needed to get it to work.
A basic knowledge of electricity - volts, amps, watts, watt-hrs, amp-hrs etc seems to me to be important. Many questions from newbies demonstrate deep ignorance of the subject and its absence can make communication difficult when people have problems.
A general understanding of components such as resistors, capacitors, transistors etc is also useful but you could probably get a great deal done without ever needing the deeper knowledge to design a transistor circuit.
...R