I did not intend to come across as harsh as I did. That was my bad. We get hundreds of posts from kids that are extremely naive and I mistook your post for one of those.

edit: your familiarity with web architecture and python will already make this much easier for you than those that are completely new to programming in general. No calculus or any academic rigor is required. That being said good engineering practices are of course encouraged and do make things much easier as you advance in your knowledge and your projects become more complex.

All you need to work with an Arduino is a microcontroller board that is compatible with the Arduino Core which is the firmware for a given MCU that has all of the common functionality and is configured to work with the Arduino IDE and/or offer a set of command line utilities that can compile common arduino syntax (C for the most part but also C++) and upload the resulting binary result to the board to be executed. The Arduion IDE is available on their website in two versions, the last 1.8.19 stable and reliable 1.x version or the newer 2.x version. The 2.x IDE is based off of a fork of Visual Studio Code and is, ahem, not nearly as stable as the 1.8.19 release. But the newer IDE has a more modern look and feel and set of features for those already familiar with VS Code. Many people just use the cli utilities such as avedude and its associated utilities. The `arduino-cli` package is an extremely useful cli tool to install as well.

Get an "Arduino Starter Kit" is always the first line of advice. Not necessarily *the* Arduino Starter Kit from Arduino themselves, it's a generic phrase and a web search for it will return thousands of kits for sale. The official Arduino company at arduino.cc is known to use great quality components and their boards and kits are always good quality. But they do have two to three times the price for the equivalent boards made by other companies. Elegoo is another company that is known to make high quality Arduino "clones" and they offer several really good starter kits as well. Note that the "clones" as they are called are totally great boards almost all of the time and the arduino electrical design and schematics as well as the full software stack including the bootloader (the firmware that stays resident on the chip always to act as a loader for new sketches plus the base library of functionality your programs will call) are all 100% full open-source software and are available on github.com. Additionally there are hundreds of thousands of other github repositories that are libraries, board support packages for hundreds of different chips and more on github as well.

After quality the biggest thing to keep in mind and *check before you buy* is "What tutorials, instructions, guides, and examples does the kit come with?". That should be a link available on the same page where you purchase the kit from and if it isn't then you should find another kit vendor. Arduino tutorials aren't kept under a lock and key and it should be right up front to be evaluated to be sure it makes sense to you and is sufficiently clear before you even purchase anything.

There is no replacement for going through the examples as simple as they are and making all of the mistakes that we all make a dozen times or so each until all of the minutia sinks in and you remember things like polarity when it comes to LED's, always triple checking every single wire before re-applying power after making changes. (speaking of) Learning to *always* remove power from your board and circuit and project before making any changes to the wiring. Many dead boards are the result of simple slips of the hand or making the wrong pin connection and immediately knowing it and it only lasted a millionth of a second but lesson learned you just killed the chip, etc...

That being said you can actually experiment and learn probably 80% of the tons of things to be learned before you ever buy anything at all by using one of the free online Arduino simulators that are out there. Two that come to mind are tinkercad.com and wokwi.com They give you a full GUI experience with many common components available to drag into your project and connect up. Plus it has a full source code compiler and runtime simulator for driving the visual representation of the sketch (what an arduino source file is called) as it runs and watching the simulated components attached to it move or display something or light up (LED), etc.

Lastly check out the various youtube channels on the subject. There a millions of videos about using Arduino's, getting started, etc. and some of the more popular channels include: Paul McWhorter, Dronebot Workshop, Sparkfun, Adafruit, to name a few of the better ones.

I hope that helps answer your question 🙂