I've been tinkering with electronics for about 30 years. Can do some cool stuff like assembling a power supply from scratch or an amplfier, can also put together projects with arduinos, raspberries, etc. I still fry components once in a while. But it's fun! If you are a programmer one hour of your time is worth a lot more than the cost of the components of many fun projects.

A few tips: - Do not touch anything you cannot afford to lose. - Buy at least twice as many components as needed for a project, if this is too expensive, that's a good sign you might want to get more experience with more simple projects before taking on this one. - Avoid soldering as much as possible, at least at the beginning. - If you want to learn how to solder do it with very simple circuits like those that only include LEDs and resistors. Practice a lot and then use your skills on a project you like. - If possible, measure components before installing, do not trust your knowledge of color codes or nomenclature or pins configurations in the case of diodes and transistors. - When tinkering with digital circuits try to use only 5V level components, avoid 3.3V components. Of course you can use converters to interface but it's nice to avoid that complexity at the beginning.

Hope this helps.

Cool, thanks! :)

>but in the case of electronics I find it much more difficult to overcome the fear that I might actually physically fry something and need to buy a new one. Anyone have tips for that?

Set yourself a learning budget and accept that blowing things up is part of the experience. It's not terribly expensive to buy a large stock of basic components. Sellers like Banggood offer assortments of resistors, capacitors, diodes and transistors for a few bucks. Arduino Nano clones are about $2 each on Aliexpress, so buy half a dozen. The Aneng AN8008 multimeter is more than good enough for student use and costs less than $25; a Daniu DT832 is perfectly usable for basic measurements and costs about $5, so it's no tragedy if you blow it up. You can find an old analog oscilloscope on eBay for about $50.

If you're getting into repair, ask your local thrift stores for broken electronics or buy a job lot of cheap broken stuff on eBay. If you can't fix it, you can always scavenge it for components.

Thanks, yeah. Though it's not necessarily so much the money (at least for cheap components), but the hassle of (a) figuring out if things are actually broken or if you're doing it wrong, and (b) actually going through the trouble of getting new components. Nice thing about software is you can use the same equipment for a while :)