The SparkFun Graphic OLED Display is pretty sweet. They carry a bunch of the 4D OLEDs now and I'm sure to use one for a future project, but these came out around 3 years ago, when OLED was still pretty new to hobbyists.
I ended up cutting my teeth on AVRs at the same time as I started playing with this. I didn't have a dev board, so I ended up making a JTAG socket out of an old dip socket by soldering some wire wrap wire and dremeling room for a 2x5 jumper on the edge. It worked pretty well, I still use it sometimes. This project required using SPI, and one thing I learned much later is that if you don't assert the MISO low if you're just doing 1-way work and not using the device as a slave, the pin will float and SPI loops will never break out if the pin goes high, making it seem like things have locked up.