After building pedals for almost 2 years now I've finally dug out the breadboard I bought at the very beginning that has since sat unused. Wow. I should have done that a long time ago!
Here's some advice for people just learning how to use them (from one novice to another):
1) Start simple: Brad mentions the
Bazz Fuss, which is perfect. I've been doing the Atari Punk Console as well--anything with minimal components (Tim Esobedo's
Circuit Snippets page is a great resource for stuff like this too).
2) Stranded-core wire sucks for breadboarding. Use
solid-core. For short connections you can also just use the cut off leads from resistors etc.
3) Gator-clips are your friend, so stock up on them. Whenever you think you have enough, double that. They are great for hooking up off-board components like pots or switches. Eventually you'll want to build a Beavis Board or likewise, but gator-clips will get you started and always come in handy (I never have enough).
4) Multiple breadboards will become necessary (just look at frequencycentral's pics to see what you can test with these bad boys...amazing). You don't want to have to rip apart the PWM you've tweaked to perfection in order to test something else, right? I have 4 right now with several different projects on them.
I hope that helps. It's probably a lot of stuff that's really obvious, but those are the things that I would have benifitted from knowing at the beginning.
As always (and as mentioned previously),
Beavisaudio.com is an invaluable resource for this stuff. He's got breadboard layouts for a number of great circuits to get started with as well as a detailed explanation of how they (and schematics, vero, perf...) work here:
http://www.beavisaudio.com/techpages/SchematicToReality/Beware though: since I started breadboarding I don't want to build a single circuit that hasn't been amply messed with first. It's addictive.