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Breadboards make it easy to hook up low voltage/ low power circuits during the early stages of their design.
If your time is worth $1 per hour, and you are going to spend more than 5 hours making electronic circuits, they are worth their modest cost, if only for all the time they will save you!
This page, at the moment, is a bit of a "placeholder". Sorry. But maybe the following will be of interest, anyway....
One source I've used repeatedly is ModernDevice, in the US. Their small breadboards were $3 each last time I bought some.
You can buy them very cheaply, from the usual cheap sources... and, as usual, they are sometimes just fine. On the other hand, I have sometimes ended up with breadboards which were almost useless, due to very strong "jaws" in the holes.
A simple breadboard will have multiple columns of little holes on a 0.1" grid. You usually get two blocks, separated by a narrow channel. (This format harks back to when we did a lot with DIL packages, which of course still have their uses today.
The clever bit of a breadboard is that all of the "holes" in a given column (on one side of the channel or the other) are interconnected. Push a wire, or component leg, into one hole in a column, and another wire into another hole in the same column, and, Presto!... they are connected! Works really well.
In addition to "simple" breadboards, as just described, you can get them with a few long rows along the top or bottom (or both) in which the pins of the ROW are interconnected. (But there is no connection... unless you make one with a little jumper... between the holes in a particular column.)
These rows are generally connected up as follows...
One goes to your circuit's "Ground". (If you are a beginner, forgive me stressing that connecting grounds is always important... so important that some people don't mention every ground connection in their writings. "Everyone knows" you need to connect to ground. Hmmm. Everyone but poor struggling novices!!)
One or more of the others are connected to whatever voltage(s) your circuit runs on.
Having a "fancy" breadboard is absolutely NOT necessary. (Most of mine are the simple type.) But I must admit, sometimes having lots of places where I can connect to ground or my Vcc is handy!
Breadboards are GREAT for low voltages, at low currents. Let's say no more than 16 volts, 1 amp.
They were never meant to be used for hooking up dangerous voltages, such as household voltages.. If you can't get your mind around the fact that you might kill yourself, bear in mind that you will die in excruciating pain. Even if that doesn't happen, you may well have a fire. Hopefully a small fire. But as you didn't intend any fire, how can you be sure it will be small. And, oh by the way, your household insurance may not cover it, if you caused it by unapproved electronics....
Please feel free to write and ask about things that you're wondering about in respect of breadboards. I'd like to improve this introduction to breadboards for the novice electronics engineer/ hobbyist/ etc. If it has already been helpful, Facebook "likes", etc would be appreciated greatly. My efforts in writing these things are worth nothing if no one becomes aware of them.
Page tested for compliance with INDUSTRY (not MS-only) standards, using the free, publicly accessible validator at validator.w3.org. Mostly passes. There were two "unknown attributes" in Google+ button code, and two further "wrong" things in the Google Translate code. Sigh.
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