This is an old revision of the document!
(not finished, I got distracted by TV then went to bed)
Arduino
Generally accepted as the best choice for those with no previous experience of microcontrollers. Plenty of help and examples avaliable. Many development boards avaliable to suit. The advantage it gives to biginners is that it does not require the user to fully understand the underlying hardware, rather provides easy access to controlling pins, using the serial interface, timers and so on.
It is based on the AVR ATMega328, see below. The arduino platform provides a bootloader for the AVR so that a seperate programmer is not needed, rather FTDI serial dongles are used to program. An AVR without the bootloader can still be used with the arduino environment.
Program in c/c++
cons: annoying to debug, not as many features as others, arduino can 'get in the way'
AVR
pro: comes in a nice set of packages, software unlimited and for linux, nice step from arduino cons: annoying to debug, not as many features as others, more expensive than others Program in c/c++
PIC
similar to AVR, blaa….
MSP430
ARM
PICAXE
While it might seem like a very simple and easy platform, once you try to do anything reasonably complex youll be crying in the corner
Parallax Propeller
eww. Just use a raspberry pi
Note: I am aware that you can program the above in ASM rather than c, but if you intend to do this, you're not really the target audience of this guide