Recommend a book that will help me make simple electronics?

I suggest hitting used bookstores and looking for the old Tandy/Radio Shack series by Forest Mims.

you can still buy the green radio shack book at radio shack, i think. it's totally great.

For general electronics, you can't beat Horowitz and Hill's The Art of Electronics. The second edition (which is the most recent) is dated in some ways: microcontrollers, logic, and op-amps have moved on by leaps and bounds. The principles are all still valid; it's just that there are better parts available now. It starts with the basics, but the learning curve is steep, so you might want to get another introductory book to help you get started. I haven't read them, but http://www.lvr.com/parprtib.htm seem like they might be a good resource too. Also you might want to check out books aimed at beginning hobby roboticists. Or http://www.seattlerobotics.org/encoder/index.html, even if you're not interested in robotics specifically. If you have access to Usenet, check out sci.electronics.misc / sci.electronics.basics, and comp.robotics.misc.

I hadn't touched electronics for a long time, and started back with PIC chips. If you get the C compiler it'll do much of the serial evilness for you (you'll probably need a max232 to get the serial voltages, but some pc serial ports are forgiving and you may get away with just inverting). I enjoyed being able to leverage the CS knowledge I had. I got the ICD2 from digikey for about $160. To get started with electronics people say that Horowitz and Hill is still the bible despite it's age. If you are really starting from scratch mucking about with a power supply and a few resitors and LED's and using a multimeter can let you see the maths working. I've ended up using it as a mental check a few times. Another thing to consider is a prebuilt solution. I've seen serial based display/keypad combos for $60-ish, not super cheap but they'll get you finished quicker. Saying that I don't know if self-education's your real aim. It was when I went back to electronics, but I'd forgotten how much slower breadboard fiddling was than coding. All the staring at spaces a frew cm across for hours. Good luck! My knowledge is a little shallow, but if you've got more questions fire away.

[on postview] Yeah, I'd forgotten about the Forrest Mims books. Does Radio Shack still sell those "Umpteen-in-One" experimenter kits?

A http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/51264b.pdf on the ICD. I should have said that it's the only thing like it I've used so I'm not sure how it stacks up to other things. http://www.digikey.com/ is here, not sure if they do Canada.

Thanks for the advice; I didn't realize that serial was harder than parallel. I've did some Max+Plus coding in undergrad, but I sold off my old text years ago... I should try and find an old copy. Oh wow, I had one of those Umpteen-in-one kits when I was a little kid. I remember making a motion detector that would emit a horrible shreiking noise whenever my sister left her room. Classic. I always wanted one of those heathkit robots too.

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/digital-electronics.htm. I skimmed it and it looks like a well-written article. They recommend some books at the end. Can't say I have any experience with this stuff outside of a couple CS architecture classes I've taken. http://www.robotstore.com/catalog/display.asp?pid=150 book for Basic Stamp programming.

I wanted to second b1tr0t's recommendation of going with the parallel port for simple interfacing. In the past, I've found Craig Peacock's http://www.beyondlogic.org/ to be an invaluable resource for this sort of thing.