Hi,

        I'll try to answer some of your questions, but perhaps some people
won't agree with me...

        For general electronics, a good book is "The art of electronics" that
Paul Horrowitz (the spelling is wrong!) wrote. It contains theory,
practical examples, labs and exercices. Nice book.

        For making your own board, get a free ;) routing tool, like Protel or
Eagle. Get some NaOH, some "perchlorure de fer" (don't know how to
translate...) and buy UV lamps (about 50$ for all these things). It's
all you need.

        FPGA's are easy to use, but you will have to pay for the development
board. It's quite expansive. But you can try Xilinx, I think they have
the cheapest dev. board. (compared to Altera and Lattice)

        I think National Seminconductor gives free databook. They send me a
lot, both analog and digital. Just ask nicely. For microcontrollers, ask
databooks from Microchip, also CDROM which contains both datasheets and
app notes. Good parts are those from Maxim, which also gives free
samples.

        You can make a simple PIC programmer, for pics that can be programmed
in serial mode, for 5$. The soft is free, and is based on the app note
589 from Microchip. Look for pip-02 and Picser.

        Sorry, I don't have time left today. Ask me personnaly for further
informations.


David