There is a plethora of electronics tutorials scattered about online. Sometimes it can be hard to separate the good ones from the bad, and the enlightening from the misinformed. We recently came across ...
Order your pcb design at jlcpcb for $2 (24 hours turnaround time). This is the most complex or detailed soldering I've done so far, the QFN20 package is very small but still not impossible to solder ...
SD cards are great inexpensive storage for your embedded project. Using SPI, they only take a few wires to hook up, and every micro-controller has a FAT file system interface to drop in your project.