A friend's son wants to get into electronics, he is 9, brilliant and loves to learn new stuff by himself. What would you recommend as a Christmas gift for him? An Arduino board and a good book on what to do with it? Maybe something else?
I too used to use those Radio Shack kits with the spring terminals, & loved it! I wound up teaching myself so much that I was able to start in 'Year 2' of a local vocational school for electronics repair- just from what I learned from those kits.<p>Later on, I felt limited by how they were designed, and found that 'Free Radio Berkeley' sold kits to build pirate radio stations, which I thought was the coolest thing I'd ever found, so I ordered some kits from them to work on. It turned out that the kits were missing quite a few parts (which weren't available through Radio Shack), so I had to search & find mail-order electronics suppliers to order the missing parts from. Another thing that was 'wrong' with these kits, which I had to find a solution for, was that they only included pictorial schematics- no use of standard electronic schematics like you'd find everywhere else. So I had to draw my own schematics based on what was present on the circuit boards. This eventually helped me in the long run, as I was able to bring the transmitter + the schematics I drew up to job interviews, & I landed my first electronics repair job based on my work on the transmitter.<p>EDIT:
Another thing you might look into that I found educational/fun is mods for CB radios. A good CB shop can sell you a CB Radio & parts which allow you to make some changes & add extra functions by making simple alterations to the circuit boards. I added more wattage, a frequency slider, extra channels above & below the standard 40, & sideband to a Cobra 148GTL back in the day. There was a small community of people on the radio where I grew up, & I would stay up late at night talking with them on my fancy radio. Later I got a linear amplifier, but was always afraid to use it since they're illegal- so I got rid of that to play it safe.
When I was a kid (way back in the 70s) my parents always used to get those Radio Shack kits with the spring terminals you could wire together between the parts to make all kinds of circuits. Similar to this kit...<p><a href="http://www.kohls.com/product/prd-1604010/elenco-200-in-1-electronic-project-lab.jsp?pfm=rrrecs-pdp-gtab1" rel="nofollow">http://www.kohls.com/product/prd-1604010/elenco-200-in-1-ele...</a><p>They still sell the old RS stuff on Ebay. I guess those Arduino boards are nice and all, but kids like to create things sometimes, not just play with pre-made stuff. I loved to tinker with things when I was a kid (and not just take alarm clock guts out and stick them in a different case) so those kinds of kits really kept up my interest.
When my daughter was younger, we bought her a "Snap Circuits Jr electronic Set". It's easy to connect and has a few projects. She liked it a lot.<p>Later we bought her a "Arduinos Sparkfun Professional Inventor's Kit", but she didn't play with it too much. (This is more expensive (x2 or x3) that buying each part separately but it's a nice starting kit and has many initial projects. (Buy more LEDs in the local store, they are cheap and nice.))<p>For more ideas, I remember a very interesting page: The Sylvia's Super-Awesome Maker Show! : <a href="http://sylviashow.com/" rel="nofollow">http://sylviashow.com/</a>
You should have a look at Circuit Scribe
<a href="http://www.circuitscribe.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.circuitscribe.com/</a><p>It's basically pens filled with some kind of metallic ink that conducts electricity. It comes with "blocks" you place on a paper sheet. You use the pens to connect the blocks.