The high parasitic capacitance of solderless breadboard makes it unusable above about 10MHz. You also have to deal with unpredictable contact resistance. PTH ICs are increasingly hard to find. Breadboard is fine for basic classroom experiments, but practically useless for most prototyping applications.

Electronics hobbyists would be well-advised to learn SPICE as quickly as possible - breadboards are an endless source of frustration once you move beyond the basics.

> The high parasitic capacitance of solderless breadboard makes it unusable above about 10MHz. You also have to deal with unpredictable contact resistance.

Most of which really isn't a problem with digital circuitry and microcontrollers because most of the peripherals are on board and your communication buses are all low speed (most <1MHz--USB being the exception).

The biggest issue with modern circuits is that even your low-speed clock lines need to have series termination resistors--even at low speed--even on a PCB. This is a weird artifact for an amateur to grasp.

The issue is that even the cheapest digital chips nowadays have super high-performance transistors on their I/O. Consequently, a 10 cent microcontroller can respond to a 1GHz signal bounce or reflection on a 100KHz clock line. And, oddly, an FR-4 board makes this worse, not better than a solderless breadboard.

Agreed. I love using a breadboard to figure out my designs, even if half the components on it are SMD chips soldered to breakout boards.

But once the design is figured out, I just go ahead and make the real PCB. Its a lot sturdier, and today is quite affordable and accessible to anyone able to figure out EDA software.