Question: I am a newbie in the software development field. I am hungry for more avenues through which I can develop, nurture, and mature in my development, scripting, and programming skills, more so outside of work time. I'd like to know what type of set-up (hardware and/or software) would be extremely beneficial or that others have found necessary for this endeavor. 

I want to be able to equip my home 'office' with tools that will enable me to progress and grow as a developer.

Answer: 
Personally, I would recommend starting with Linux - just about every programming language has good free tools on Linux. Then I would use VMWare to make virtual machines with various other platforms you might want to test your software on - Windows, other Linux distros, maybe OpenSolaris, etc. Again, in my experience Linux with a Windows VM works better than Windows with a Linux VM.
Nothing will help more than picking a project that uses the technologies you're most interested in and building it. You could decide you're going to learn X language or read a book on Y for no other reason than to increase your knowledge, but even if you have the willpower to follow through all the way I'm willing to bet you'll learn just as much and get much more satisfaction out of basing your learning around something practical.

As far as specific tools, well, the only answer depends on what you want to do. You could end up using Visual C# Express from Microsoft, NetBeans IDE for Java, or Xcode on a Mac. All of these are free, but it's really what you plan to do with the tools that matters, not that you have them installed on your hard drive. The same thing goes for hardware and OS too, you might want to have a good Windows PC for building a game in C#, or use a Mac for web development, etc. Decide what you want to do, and pick the best tools that allow you to accomplish that goal.

One thing that is pretty much independent of everything is some kind of version control; it's a good idea no matter what project or technology you use. Git and Subversion are two popular, cross platform choices.