Depends on what you want to do. Getting a beagleboard would be a no brainer to start out. http://www.amazon.com/ARM-System-Developers-Guide-Architecture/dp/15

Depends on what you want to do. Getting a beagleboard would be a no brainer to start out. http://www.amazon.com/ARM-System-Developers-Guide-Architecture/dp/1558608745 http://www.amazon.com/ARM-System-Developers-Guide-Architectu... is a good book, you might want to buy a copy. Some handy things to know about ARM.. logical operations can be added on to ALU instructions for free -- lots of speed gains there... If you have never done any embedded programming; expect things to take longer to write, and frustration levels can be pretty ugly. If you get an ARM chip that doesn't have floating point, and you need to do something mathematically intensive, look into fixed point math. Make everything you can into a table (most ARM chips have enough memory so that you can trade space for speed) Don't give up -- embedded requires tenacity. Oh, and Codesourcery provides good pre-compiled toolchains, but you have to dig around on their website a bit to find them.