Looking at the Automation Forum I see a lot of really cool Arduino Projects. I don't see much in the way of an entry point though for someone who is at the beginning of the process and is hitting the ground running. I figured I'd compile a few good resources to start off.
Books - These Range From Absolute Beginner to General Reference:
-Getting Started With Arduino
-Practical Arduino - Cool Projects for Open Source Hardware - Jonathan Oxer & Hugh Blemings
-The Arduino Cookbook - Michael Margolis
-The C Programming Language - Kernighan and Richie (This isn't an arduino book per-se, but, Arduino's speak an offshoot of C and its general structure and functions are best understood through a knowledge of C)
To get up and running you can immediately get your hands dirty right at the source. Arduino
has a very good tutorials page to begin with.
As to more advanced learning are a lot of good tutorials out there but the end all be all as far as I'm concerned is TronixStuff
. Starting from the most basic the tutorials build on each other to very advanced stuff and are the best way to learn Arduino, if not basic C programming and hardware basics, that I've found online.
For more specific things once you're more advanced (or you don't want to learn linearly) searching Instructables
generally results in a pretty solid tutorial.
-Hope this helps a few people out there.