You can always get MSP430 Launchpads at $9.99 which comes with a MSP430G2x in a DIP. You can breadboard it if you want or you can run it on the board itself. Th

You can always get MSP430 Launchpads at $9.99 which comes with a MSP430G2x in a DIP. You can breadboard it if you want or you can run it on the board itself. The individual MSP430G2x are also pretty cheap. So if you blow one up you can always replace the chip. The documentation for STM and TI is far, far below the standard of Atmel's, both officially and unofficially. It's more difficult to find information, there's a much smaller development community for beginners and the boards start in TQFP. >That last part alone stops most people from playing with ARM, because you're almost forced to get boards made. At least with AVR/PIC you can prototype most of the Atmegas on a breadboard. Obviously there's a limit to what you can do with an AVR, but you can do a lot with 20MHz. Isn't it why we have development/prototyping boards right? You can always develop/experiment your code in it and also develop your PCB in parallel. In this way when there are problems with your custom board you can always be sure of your code. In my experience TI documentation is excellent but their software sometimes is over engineered especially TI-RTOS. Personally I have worked on the STM32F series and I found the documentation good. Also if you want to read through the internals of the ARM architecture you will have to refer to the ARM manuals from ARM website.