It sort of depends on what you're interested in. Audio? Radio? Basic robotics? Cool digital sensors? Something that tweets every time you open your refrigerator door? Simplest answer buy an arduino intro kit with breadboard and some pre-made jumper wires.
There's lots of advice geeking out about special high-quality soldering gear, my advice is don't even worry about that yet. You're mostly going to be doing breadboarding at first anyway. And besides a cheap iron is fine. (Everyone, please stop glaring at me.)
Only other piece of equipment you might want is a cheap multimeter. You can get these off amazon for $9. Sure it's not going to be accurate in some edge case you can find but 97% of the time you only ever use the continuity tester and after that the voltage tester, which are pretty hard to get wrong. No, you will not need an oscilloscope or a logic analyzer or a special high quality multimeter or anything like that.
Save the big purchases for when you know you really care about it. Front-loading the cost of a bunch of special gear before you even know why you might need it and may never is a hobby anti-pattern. You can just buy cheap beginner kits.
Otherwise, and arguably sort of ruining the fun, are circuit simulators. A good one is falstad.com/circuit/ . It's much faster to draw up a simulation than to put together a breadboard circuit, you can add instrumentation and swap values ad nauseam, and you are less likely to make an inscrutable wiring mistake that contributes to small declines in your mental health than you are with a physical prototype. I use this for small analog circuits all the time to double check myself.
Agreed 100%. This is a great way to get into electronics while also getting some coding experience. The Arduino intro kit has lots of great experiments and corresponding lessons. It comes with a breadboard, special wires that press right in, resistors, LEDs, switches, and more.
There's lots of advice geeking out about special high-quality soldering gear, my advice is don't even worry about that yet. You're mostly going to be doing breadboarding at first anyway. And besides a cheap iron is fine. (Everyone, please stop glaring at me.)
Only other piece of equipment you might want is a cheap multimeter. You can get these off amazon for $9. Sure it's not going to be accurate in some edge case you can find but 97% of the time you only ever use the continuity tester and after that the voltage tester, which are pretty hard to get wrong. No, you will not need an oscilloscope or a logic analyzer or a special high quality multimeter or anything like that.
Save the big purchases for when you know you really care about it. Front-loading the cost of a bunch of special gear before you even know why you might need it and may never is a hobby anti-pattern. You can just buy cheap beginner kits.
There are some good youtube channel suggestions. One to add is Eugene K's visualizations of the physics of voltages and electronic components: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkyBCj4JhHt8DFH9QysGW...
Otherwise, and arguably sort of ruining the fun, are circuit simulators. A good one is falstad.com/circuit/ . It's much faster to draw up a simulation than to put together a breadboard circuit, you can add instrumentation and swap values ad nauseam, and you are less likely to make an inscrutable wiring mistake that contributes to small declines in your mental health than you are with a physical prototype. I use this for small analog circuits all the time to double check myself.
Have fun.