I am familiar with them but games and emulation have not really been what I have done (most of that is XBMC, asterisk and raspian).
There are two models
Model a
Model b
Model a is the one aimed at education. You do not want this (no network out of the box for one and less ram for another).
Model b is the one aimed at consumers and is probably about $10 more at $35. There was a revision which means the later models (which most vendors will stock) come with 512 megs of RAM rather than 256.
Strictly speaking the only official vendors are
http://www.newark.com/jsp/bespoke/b...ories.jsp&ICID=HP-TP-Raspberry-pi-Accessories and
https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/233 (together they represent two of the big three electronics suppliers, the remaining one is
http://www.digikey.com/ ). However you can buy them just as easily on Amazon if you want.
"for practicing coding."
Other than them having a bit of IO you can easily play with (harder now computers tend not to come with serial or parallel ports*) you might as well go with a normal computer (
http://learnpythonthehardway.org/ and
http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html ) or if you really want a virtual machine. Still they do support most programming languages in common use so you could do far worse.
*things like the arduino and teensy devices do exist for a reason.
Case. Any really. I have not really tried any others beyond the "official" clear one and
these black ones. If you plan to hang things off the IO (not something I have done a lot of) read the reviews to make sure you are not getting one that is hard to use with that.
Power supply. I forget the limit offhand but you are supposed to not go above something like 1200mA. This is fine as long as you do not want to add any power hungry devices (indeed you can got quite a lot lower) onto the thing and power it from the Pi (wireless cards, external hard drives that draw power from the USB and so on).
What you need to get going
The pi
A power supply, if you have a microUSB cable and a port willing to provide a bit more than the 500 mA the USB spec calls for or better yet a twin microUSB cable and a couple of powers you have one you can play with. Otherwise you will need one of these.
A SD card. 2 gigs is enough to do a lot with but I like 4 at least and 8 works well if you want to run multiple operating systems off a single card. More is nice but only really if you want to have videos on there (USB, network shares and more are available remember).
You can output via HDMI or a RCA slot (HDMI does audio and there is a headphone jack on the thing if you prefer that instead) so have some of those.
A USB keyboard and mouse works well too as you will probably want to move a mouse and type something.
The starter kit stuff I am not so sold on but I have all this sort of stuff sitting around doing nothing most of the time where you might not. Do give a thought to putting such things together yourself if you do this though.
