[antirez]

The Arduino is absolutely cool, but the reason I recommend it is that it can be a good start to get introduced to analog electronics, that is even cooler for programmers. As after all the arduino itself for a programmer is just a small computer. Cool but nothing completely different especially if you used to write code in assember or C. But... analog programing, creating an AM receiver or transmitter, amplifying using a transistor, creating an oscillator, well, that is magic.

[landonfuller]

I actually feel the opposite -- microcontrollers are exactly why I got back into electronics. Being able to write a few lines of code that interact with the 'real' world -- that's what I find exciting, and analog circuits are tedious necessities in comparison.

Regardless of your ultimate interest Arduino (and the AVR microcontroller family in general) is a decent place to start :)

If you do have previous development experience, you'll probably want to move past Arduino pretty quickly. You can pick up an Atmel STK500 development board for just $79, and either use it with AVR Studio or the open source toolchains (avrdude, avr-gcc, avr-libc, etc): http://store.atmel.com/PartDetail.aspx?q=p:1050007

[wanderr]

I agree with you. It's the coolest thing ever to control physical things from my computer via programs that I write. The possibilities are endless. :)