so I've been interested in ham radio for a while now, my neighbor is licensed and he's been bugging me to get my ticket for like two years. I finally decided to just do it but honestly I dont even know where to begin. I looked at the FCC website and it was kind of confusing. do I need to buy a book or is there free stuff online? and how hard is the test actually, I'm not great with electronics but I'm not totally clueless either. also is there like a fee to take the test or does it cost money to get the license itself, I saw some conflicting info about that. any help would be appreciated, feel free to point me wherever

HamStudy.org is honestly where I'd start if I were doing it over again. It's free and it uses spaced repetition to drill you on the actual question pool, so you're not just memorizing random stuff, it kind of figures out what you're weak on and keeps hitting you with those questions. The technician pool isn't huge and a lot of it is pretty logical once you get the basic concepts down. Some of the electrical theory stuff can feel weird at first but you don't need to deeply understand all of it, just enough to recognize the right answer. I'd also grab the ARRL Technician manual if you want something to read through at night, but honestly a lot of people pass just using HamStudy alone without buying anything. As for cost, the exam itself is usually ten bucks or so depending on the club running the session, some VE teams have started charging a bit more recently, and the FCC license fee used to be free but they started charging like 35 dollars through their system a couple years ago. Your neighbor who's licensed should be able to point you to a local club running a session nearby, that's probably the easiest way to find one.

yeah i just did this like three months ago, it really wasnt that bad. i used hamstudy and just did like 20 minutes a day for two weeks and passed no problem. the hardest part for me was the electrical formulas, ohms law and stuff, but theres only a few of them and once you do enough practice questions you kind of just recognize what they're asking. dont stress too much about it honestly. the test is 35 questions and you need 26 right so theres some room for error