I have been researching for quite awhile now, and I can't decide which microcontrollers offer the most learning, and programming capabilities. I would like to hear about your expiriences, and how you learned to program. Also I would like to know which PIC's AVR's ect. that are out there because i think a variety would come in handy for different purposes. (if not let me know)
I have a lot of good ideas that would be a whole lot of fun to see in action and use in the house.
I also have a budget of about $50

hopefully I can one day live in the house of the Jetsons
thanks in advance

A good starting place:

http://makezine.com/controller/

Have fun!

Well I personally havent dealt with micro controllers, yet. How-ever I did a little research a while ago, and (I know there may be better things out there, but...) try here http://www.parallax.com/ They have controllers for the uber beginner, to seasoned professional. The basic stamp looks good just because there is no messing with tricky design work. You basically give it power, send it a program and off you go. They design those things to remove any guess work. Later after you grasp the concept of controllers, then you move to a pic controller, add some memory, and voltage reg, etc. for a smaller, more customized package. They also have multi-core pics, along with controllers that run off of JAVA !

If you have a low end budget, then I might recommend either a simple AVR test board or maybe a platform like Arduino. Easy on the budget and can get you started with the basics of programming.

These days most of my stuff is on much larger ARM7 processors (but not too expensive ~$7 depending on peripherals / memory), but there's a steep learning curve and lots of assumed knowledge in most of the documentation. 700 page PDFs anyone?

I just ordered an Arduino a few days ago. It looks very simple considering I already know a lot of programming.