A Raspberry Pi is usually just used as a Linux machine, with the addition of some libraries to handle the IO pins. If you're at all familiar with Linux, it's a

A Raspberry Pi is usually just used as a Linux machine, with the addition of some libraries to handle the IO pins. If you're at all familiar with Linux, it's a relatively easy way to start playing. An Arduino isn't a self-hosting environment (you'd do your actual development on a PC and deploy it to the Arduino), but the hardware's simpler and cheaper. I haven't done as much with it, but there are tons of tutorials to get started with it, and the default development environment will be comfortable if you've done anything in C before.