AVR-Chat

Good Afternoon,

I'm looking into digging into AVR's and looking for some advice before
I spend any money. My goal is to do some robotics control projects,
preferably programming in C/C++ although I think it would be valuable
to learn the native instruction set as well. No more than 4 motors and
4-10 simple sensors to start, so not an insane amount of I/O or I/O
processing.

I have some experience with PIC's and the Motorola MC68HC11, although
I've always programmed in higher level languages (InteractiveC, and
whatever the PIC basic language is called), so I'm not a complete
newbie when it comes to microprocessors. I have the basic electronics
test equipment and supplies, etc.

What would you guys recommend as a "starter kit" to start learning and
then proceed forward with some projects? An ISP and some chips or a
prefabbed board? I'm open to any suggestions.

Thanks,

Philip