It's just like software, honestly. You start with "hello world", not a 3D game or a TCP/IP stack.

I build furniture, which has surprisingly little overlap with carpentry, which TFA is much closer to. To be clear, I'm not saying one is better or worse, but they are different.

I got started down that path taking a basic hand tools class, which in turn started not with "here's a bit of wood", but "here's a grinder and some sharpening stones". After getting our planes acceptably sharp, then we learned how to take a piece of rough lumber and turn it into a board with two flat, parallel faces, two edges parallel and square to the faces, and two ends square to the faces and edges. We (eventually) progressed to joinery from there.

It was sort of the Learn Python the Hard Way of woodworking: if you don't learn the basic steps and skip right to something cool, you're forever dependent on somebody else doing the basic stuff for you and accepting what you can get (milling the lumber, in this case). Or you have to go back and learn it anyway. To quote Raney Nelson[0]: "If you cannot already do the machine's job by hand, the machine will outwit you."

I try to avoid milling lumber by hand because it would be a surefire way to lose money hand over fist on most projects, but it's a good skill to have when your boards are bigger than your jointer.

If you don't want to spend money on a class, there are infinite youtube videos. What you lose learning that way is somebody watching what you're doing and telling you why you aren't getting what you want done.

Getting into the tools is something you can do pretty incrementally and inexpensively if you are willing to put some time into it. There are plenty of excellent old Stanley planes out there for $40 to $70. Buy pre-war. The quality dropped off afterwards as power tools got cheap. If you take the time to learn how to tune one up, you'll know your tool better than if you spend a couple hundred bucks on a Lie-Nielsen or a Veritas (which are both excellent tools, let me be clear) or ~$170 on a new import (Wood River, Bench Dog, whatever. No experience, no opinion).

The US-made Buck Brothers chisels at Home Depot are decent steel and a steal at the price of ~$15 a piece. The modern Stanley Sweethearts are a good middle of the road choice (I own a set; I'll upgrade them piecemeal as I need to). You can spend as much or as little on saws as you want to. I have a $15 Husky from Home Depot I use occasionally, and a Lie-Nielsen dovetail saw I spent an order of magnitude more on. They both cut, but the LN is worth sharpening when it gets dull.

The layout and sharpening tools are worth spending money on. You can get a decent combination square for $40 (anything that's $15 at your local hardware store is crap. A $100 Mitutoyo or Starrett is worth the investment if you're in it for the long haul), a decent marking gauge for a similar price, and a decent marking knife for under $40. Figure $120 for the basics. Another roughly $40 for a Shinwa sliding bevel (again, hardware store stuff is crap) for angled work, and you're pretty well covered for the basics.

For sharpening, a craigslist grinder will probably cover your needs for $50 or under. You certainly don't need a Baldor, and you don't need slow speed. Any 7" or 8" grinder will do. And then spend what you want to on oil stones, water stones, or a piece of glass and some sandpaper/emery paper. They all do the same thing, and a discussion of the tradeoffs is outside the scope of this thread.

My first "workbench" at home was a stupidly cheap IKEA table. I screwed 1/4" MDF into the legs to keep it from racking, and a use a couple clamps in lieu of a vise. It sucked, and it was slow, but you can get work done on it if you want to.

Starting with an inexpensive set of tools, you can get a lot done. Build a couple things from the canon of absolute beginner projects: A bird house, a tool box, etc. Build them slowly and intentionally, focusing on precision. Get a copy of The Anarchist's Design Book[1] and pick a project out of there (the staked furniture projects will require a few additional tools), any of the excellent books on Shaker furniture, or a subscription to Fine Woodworking or Popular Woodworking. Pick a project or two from there and build it.

The joinery that holds wood together hasn't fundamentally changed in literally thousands of years[2]. I don't mean to be flippant about this, but Jesus was a carpenter, and while he had a lot of firsts, working in wood wasn't one of them.

So yeah, we're talking maybe $600-$800 all-in on tools to get started. That's more than an iPhone SE, but less than a Mac Mini. The tools will last several lifetimes: my newest Stanley plane was built during WWII. Is that expensive? It depends on how you look at it, I guess.

Was it worth it for me? I mean, I do it for money now instead of writing code. The pay is a lot worse, but I'm fortunate to be married to somebody who is better paid, we leave cheaply, and I love what I do.

[0] https://www.daedtoolworks.com/lounge-against-the-machine-dae...

[1] https://lostartpress.com/collections/books/products/the-anar...

[2] http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/article00788.html