What's a good Arduino starter kit?

[victor]

I dont understand what the issue is with the Arduino IDE. It is a great place to start and I have been using Arduino boards for years now and have never had a single issue with the IDE. You should check out the new IDE , it has a few extra features.

Don't get me wrong, it was ideal when I first got my arduino and just wanted to play with it straight away, I didn't want to setup a fricking AVR IDE, I just wanted to burn and run code. So it is really nice because of that, pretty much plug n play and ready to go, no distractions.

But it really lacks a good editor, no code completion, very little syntax highlighting,  indenting code is very frustrating there. There's not even a ruler with the number lines.

These are my main complains.

[zapta]

Best Arduino starter kit? Any kind of Arduino and a hammer.

I don't understand the hate. The Arduino eco system is a great way to introduce people to the world of embedded programming and C/C++.  I wish it was available when I started years ago to play with microprocessors (I used to write 6800 machine code on paper and then enter it into RAM with hex keyboard and hardware loader I built from 74xxx logic).  I greatly appreciate the availability of Arduino boards, IDE, shields, peripherals, libraries and sample sketches, it's pure awesomeness.

[rob77]

any AVR arduino board is a good starting point - including the very simple "IDE" - it's convenient for beginners and does the job.

later on one will find the included IDE very limiting and the arduino libraries very slow  - and that's the point in time when should start using virtually any IDE for C/C++ along with  AVR GCC + avrdude (or any other programmer), study the AVR datasheets and start writing his own code optimized for the application instead of using the arduino libraries.

[zapta]

later on one will find the included IDE very limiting and the arduino libraries very slow  - and that's the point in time when should start using virtually any IDE for C/C++ along with  AVR GCC + avrdude (or any other programmer), study the AVR datasheets and start writing his own code optimized for the application instead of using the arduino libraries.

You can skip the Arduino libraries and do direct I/O even from the Arduino IDE. The libraries are optional and you can also mix libraries for some functions and direct I/O for others.

The advantage of the Arduino IDE is the one package installation of the entire tool chain on all three major operating systems and it has an option for using external editor (never tried it).

Having simple toolchain installation is important for open source projects because it makes it much easier for others to replicate your development environment.