[zw123456]

This was a pretty good overview. I get asked this same question a lot because I have been working with microprocessors for decades and I have used many different ones from the old 8051 to Microchip, Arm and even FPGA embedded. The way I usually start is I ask this "will you need an OS like Linux ?" (there are a bunch of follow on questions on that issue to decide that.

If the answer is yes then that steers you to a much bigger and more expensive chip, usually and increases the complexity significantly. For beginners who need an OS for their project, I steer them to the RPI simply because there is just a ton of resources on the web to help them along. There are other really good boards but I steer them to an off the shelf solution like that and the RPI seems to be really well supported.

If you don't need Linux or RTOS or similar then that narrows it to a lower end simpler solution. For beginners I almost always steer them to the Arduino even though I rarely use it myself but for the same reason, tons of support on the web and you can, over time move to C or C++ on it as you advance your skills.

I am not a big super fan of those platforms I personally have my own dev system using my own boards and system that I have evolved over the years to be able to get designs done very fast. But I just think those are good starting points for a beginner.