PCB Fabrication Tips:

If you're going to be doing work with microcontrollers, or complex digital circuits, being able to fabricate your own PC Boards is a very useful ability. I've learned a bit while doing this myself, and I can come up with some suggestions:

Schematic Capture and Layout:

I use a program called 'Orcad', which has schematic capture and layout capabilities. You first draw up a schematic, which looks much like the schematics I've posted in my projects. Then, you create a netlist and import the schematic into layout. Layout will let you place components onto a virtual circuit board and autoroute the board for you.

What autorouting does is to automatically draw traces between the components according to your schematic. It does this such that traces are as efficient as possible, no traces touch each other, etc. It can be configured to create single sided board with jumpers which saves you a lot of time and money over double sided boards.

Another program I've used is called "Eagle", which worked very well, and I believe they have a student (or Free) version.

Methods to create an etch resist on a pcb:

Use a material called "press and peel". This is a transparency sheet coated with a blue powder. You run it through your laser printer and then iron it onto the pc board. Boards that I've made this way usually have only a few imperfections that need touch-up. I bought my press-n-peel from www.elexp.com.
Alternatively, if you can find an old flatbed pen plotter (i bought a graphtec MP2300 on ebay for about $30), you can possibly use the plotter to draw on the circuit board directly. If you want to try this, be prepared to spend a lot of time tinkering around figuring out how to get it to work. I tried this for a while and then went back to the press-n-peel method.
The last and most tedious alternative is to draw the schematic manually using an etch resist pen. This works for simple schematics, but for anything more complex, I'd highly recomment press-n-peel.

Touch-up: Look for any imperfections and touch them up with an etch resist pen (a fine tip scripto marker will do. My favorite Staedtler Lumocolor 313 superfine). Correcting problems before you etch the board is a lot easier than correcting it after.

Etching the board:

There are two chemicals that are popular for etching: Ferric Chloride and Ammonium Persulphate. FeCl is a nasty substance to work with. It's highly poisonous and will stain anything that gets near it. In my opinion, Ammonium Persulphate is the far better choice. It's not as dangerous and does not stain. The drawback is that Ammonium Persulphate needs to be heated to be used (FeCl does not).

I purchased my Ammonium Persulphate and an etching tank/heater from www.webtronics.com. The heater looks is a typical aquarium heater, and you might be able to find one cheaper.

Tin Plating:

I've tried electroless tin plating and have never had satisfactory results. In my experience, tin plating the board is entirely unnecessary.

Drilling:

I use a dremel and the dremel drill press (which is a miniature drill press that you clamp your dremel into). You'll need a lot of small drill bits, which are not so easy to come by. I usually pilot-drill the holes with a 0.025 bit and then enlarge them to 0.034 as necessary.

Soldering:

Save yourself a lot of grief and buy a good temperature controlled soldering iron with a thin tip. I use an XYTronic iron that I bought from Jameco about 10 years ago and it's still running strong. Buy some nice thin solder (Radio Shack has something that'll work).

The technique that I use is to hold the iron such that the tip touches both the pin of the component and the copper pad. Count about three seconds and then touch the solder to it. Make sure the solder flows around both the pad and pin, and then remove the solder and iron.