Raspberry Pi - Introduction on Baking Pi

I'm starting my last programming course for my degree of information processing science in the spring, and after I heard a rumour that we'll work with Raspberry Pis, I wanted to make some queries on acquiring one of my own. That is, if they know where to buy one so that I don't necessarily have to wait for months as one of my friends told happened to him. However, the lecturer of the course told that the Raspberry Pis at our department are actually free for students to borrow before the course where they will be used starts in March. I decided that this is a great chance to get  an excuse to get some extra programming exercise and also to get my hands on Raspberry Pi before I'll decide whether to invest on one.

As I wanted to have some starting point and also material on which I could make a required learning diary (requirement for getting my hands on a Pi ;)) and noticed that University of Cambridge has a free online course on building a very simple operating system on the Raspberry Pi (You can find it here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/freshers/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/). The focus is on getting the operating system to interact with the hardware, and the code will be written almost completely on assembly language, and here, since we are working with Raspberry Pi, the variety of assembler code will be ARMv6.

I'm sure most of the developer community has by now heard more than enough about what Raspberry Pi is all about, so I'll happily skip all that (If you don't have or simply want to see what is hot right now the raspberrypi.org is probably the best place to go). All I have to say is that starting to play around with Raspberry Pi has been made really easy with all the beginner-friendly material online. I got an element14 SD-card with Debian 6 for Linux pre-installed on it and there was no extra work needed before getting to start working on the project.