Hardware resources:
- Get started with this great instructable, How to choose a MicroController
- Application Note from Freescale on choosing a MCU. Slightly more professionally oriented, but very useful.
- A guide from Microchip on selecting amongst the PIC series of microcontrollers.
- This reference is a bit dated (from 1998) but gives some excellent insight into most of the microprocessor families that are still dominant.
- LadyAda's PIC vs AVR Smackdown
- Circuit Cellar article on selecting a microcontroller
- The Six Myths of microcontroller choice
- Arduino, the modern, healthy alternative to basic stamps.
- Article from todbot on Arduino, "the basic stamp killer!"
- Peter H. Anderson
Embedded Processor Control-- Excellent reference on (and site to buy small quantities of)
BASIC Stamps, 68HC11s, PICs, PICAXEs, etc. His discussion of the PICAXE is particularly interesting.
- Introduction to Microcontrollers @ Society of Robots
I've also written down a list of a few potentially useful open-source microcontroller programming environments:
- Table of free software tools for embedded systems
- SDCC The Small Device C Compiler, for 8051, Z80, 68HC08, etc. Works under (at least) Mac, Windows, Linux.
- AVR-libc, the basis of AVR-GCC, the open-source compiler for AVR microcontrollers
- win-avr, AVR-GCC for windows
- gnupic.org has resources for open-source programming of PIC chips. (Unfortunately, there aren't a whole lot of good options yet.)
- GNU ARM toolchain for Cygwin, Linux and MacOS.
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