[malcolmputer]

1. Contextual Electronics does have a really good course on kicad.

2. Kicad is a very good PCB software package.

Word of warning though, kicad is currently in a state of "flux" with the latest stable from 2013, and the bleeding edge versions having all of the features you want to use. I personally use nightly builds and the 2013 version quite often, and neither are what I would call professionally stable.

[technomancy]

One cool thing about the new version is that it uses s-expressions for its file format. I was disappointed to find that I couldn't perform rotation on a group of footprints at once, but once I took a look at the file format I found it was easy to load into Racket, do a little trig, and spit out the rotated forms: https://github.com/technomancy/atreus/blob/master/atreus.rkt...