To begin, I don't know a lick of code. I want to lead C++. Once I've got some of that under my belt my plan is to build an electric brewery on troll. No, I'm definitely not he first to do this. I'm not sure if the Beaglebone, Arduino, or Raspberry Pi would work bet for me.
My project will need around 25 GPIO pins, SPI or I2C for running displays and some 7 segment timers/volume/temp read outs as well. I want to be able to record, and repeat my temperature through the brew process, and even use the recorded data to reproduce another brew later on.
That having been said, Arduino seems more expensive because I'd need a shield for the data capturing. The Pi would need some kind of expansion board for the GPIO pins. The black seems to fit my bill, but also scares me off a bit because it seems o much mor advanced than the Arduino.
I have a cheap Chinese knockoff Arduino Uno in the mail to learn a bit (blinks LED, hello world etc) but as far as my big plans, can I get some advice on hardware. Advice an learning code would be great too. I've been perusing YouTube, adafruit, arduino's forums and tons of google, but I'm feeling lost still.
If you are planning to use the Beagle Bone, I would suggest you learn bonescript (derived from javascript). Here is a good link to learn: http://www.codecademy.com/learn
This is also a great link to learn how to program. They have examples on every page and you can interface with the code and compile it yourself: http://www.w3schools.in/cplusplus/intro/
Devicetree is a hardware description language used by the Linux kernel. Bonescript, is a collection of javascript libraries which let you interact with the kernel API using the power of node.js.
If I were you, I would start off toggling LED's and reading I/O in bonescript, then progress to Python once you understand the Linux architecture a bit better; and finally, if you feel it is worth it and you need the performance, give C/C++ a go.