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To be honest, as a kid I never found the "500 in 1" kits to be up to scratch, but maybe that was just me.

A good textbook a decent breadboard and a good selection of components would be far more useful IMO.

My first ever book was Adventures with Electronics which was fun, but didn't really explain what happened well enough, so I'd combine it with something by M.W. Brimicombe to explain the why's and wherefore's (mine was a GCSE textbook) - unfortunately I can't track down the exact title as it seems to be out of print :(

Moving upwards though the book of choice has to be The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill - it's excellent!

This book was based off the one-semester course Physics 123 taught at Harvard. In the course itself, which is taken by people of all majors, you design and build all kinds of things like radio receiver and transmitters, amps, filters, and after maybe 4-5 weeks you actually design and build a circuit to take an audio signal, figure out a way to transmit it via infrared diodes, receive it with infrared photodiodes across the room, and rebuild the audio structure and play back on a speaker. This was satisfactorily done in the class by psychology majors with absolutely no prior electronic or much physics background. If they can do it, you can.

The second half of the book (and the course) is digital electronics, culminating in the building of a 68008 digital computer with a motherboard-based breadboard. People have gone on to add things such as putting two DACs and feeding the output to an oscilloscope to draw pictures, and programming the CPU to make a PacMan game, for example. Really wild stuff.

The book is awsome, it starts with resistors, then capacitors, and goes on to transistors, and then op-amps, going from ideal to real-world structures. And you really only need some high-school level algebra to follow it. The reading is not dry at all, the authors actually make it interesting to read.

The only criticism I ever heard about this book was by a guy with a masters in Electrical Engineering who commented that one of their circuits wouldn't work in the high-Megahertz range and was a faulty design, and said much of their stuff isn't high-end design. This guy has a masters degree, and spent 6 years of education taking advanced EE courses, so if that's his critique of the book then you can bet that for people trying to go from nothing to complicated systems it's a great book.

The Student Lab Manual for the Art of Electronics has a great design for an MC68008 based computer that you can build on a large breadboard (48 pin DIP package on the processor, discrete CMOS logic for the "chipset" and 8K of RAM, however, it is a simple exercise to add more).

Some of the components can be kind of expensive (the hex displays and the ADC/DACs, most notably), and you'll definitely need a logic probe and an oscilloscope (although, those should be considered required for any project like this).

The University of Washington Physics Department uses AoE as the textbook for their electronics labs, and the advanced one is building the 68008 computer and making it do something (I wrote & built a multi-threaded oscilloscope pong game). I highly suggest the book, it is truly excellent to learn from and as a reference.

Jeff

Paul Horowitz is a physicist at Harvard who's primary claim to fame is being one of the co-authors of The Art of Electronics. The other author being Winfield Hill.

Paul is a damn smart guy, is pretty funny, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of electronics. I took the Physics 123 class with him and Tom Hayes at Harvard about 5 years ago so I have some sense of his intellect.

His primary research interests are with SETI, and he has old/surplus electronics from the projects META and BETA, among others in his office. He once popped off a Motorola 68000 processor from one of those project boards to loan me for a side project with the class (instead of using the 68008's that are employed toward the end of the course), and he called it "the DIP that ate Chicago" because it's so damn huge.

Since his research involves primarily electronics and the engineering aspects of building large arrays of radio receivers for SETI projects, he referred to himself as a "fallen physicist". He even called me that too because at the time I had physics undergrad degree, but was working at an engineering lab at MIT. (Of course now I'm back in physics grad school ;-) )

So anyway, I get the impression from him that he really knows what he's talking about, and I would tend to trust his scientific judgement about his research project. Now if you assume he's specifically lying or covering up, that's another story. But from a scientific point of view he knows what he's talking about.

The newer technologies are much harder to learn from than the older ones. The speeds are much higher, the protocols are more complicated, and the tools are more expensive. For a beginner learning this stuff, you never want to work with the latest technologies.

This applies to all sorts of things. The idea of the class is not to learn RS-232 or RS-485 or RS-3.14159 or whatever. The idea is to learn serial computer-to-computer communication, and the best way to do that is to minimize time on the nuances of the protocol and get the general concepts down. RS-*** is simple, so you can get the mechanics out of the way quickly.

The best electronics class I ever took (Physics 123 at Harvard from the creators of The Art of Electronics) had us building a computer from individual chips based around a 68000 processor. Nothing modern and useful like VGA cards or PCI, but now I have a good understanding of the general concepts behind microcomputer design. Never could have done that in 1/2 a semester with current technology.

Horowitz and Hill's The Art of Electronics Is a wonderful review of basic EE concepts, from circuit design to device physics. Though it moves pretty quickly, and therefore might not provide the best introduction to the range of subjects it covers, I have found it an invaluable reference for those things that you learned a while back but can't quite recall. Doesn't get as detailed as a book on a more focused subject would either, but usually tells you enough to acomplish what you're trying to do. Detailed index; can look up that one equation you need, and be done.

The first thing you need to do is to understand all the logic gates and how they work, and then work with the various logic gate chips (the 74 series) to get various simple experiments working. This will get you familiar with HOW the circuits are passing information around, as well as give you some experience with wiring the components together in a useful fashion.

Whilst you're reading up on this you'll probably find that most electronics text books include chapters on computers.

My personal favourite "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill walks you through an example of incorporating a 68008 (I think, I haven't actually got my copy of it available at the moment) into an instrument (ie. specialized rather then general purpose computer) they construct in chapter 11.

If you want to start off really simple (think more of really simple programable calculator kind of level) then something more along the lines of a PIC 16fxx microcontroller from Microchip is a good starting point, as you can have something up and running very quickly with just a breadboard, the microcontroller and a handful of discrete components (and maybe some LED's for output) using a PC to program the device, and then slowly add to the base design with some external memory, and LCD display, a numeric keypad for input, and so on ...