You pretty much need a PCB with the appropriate pattern on it for most SMD work - however beyond that, the actual soldering often isn't that bad.
Breakout boards for specific packages are also reasonably available on ebay and from the usual hobby electronics vendors - the common ones are dirt cheap on ebay - though inevitably you end up with a mess of little boards.
As it happens, I sell some prototyping board that has slots for SMD parts on it, which sounds like it might be just what some people here are looking for: (image is a link)
My technique for soldering them I think is pretty standard....
Securely hold board (I use a desk-vise which I can move and rotate easily, but is heavy enough to hold the board still).I put solder on the board, on one pad for each part. Then I go back and tack each part in place on that one pin (tweezers in one hand, iron in other). Then I put flux on all the unsoldered pins. Passives are soldered normally, SOIC/TSSOP/TQFP/etc by drag soldering (youtube it). I frankly prefer soldering SOIC over DIP now.
If I buy a board like this, I can't really cut it up to use parts of it, right? Boards themselves are kind of brittle. So if I want a board I better be ready to use as much of it as possible or be able to part with unused sections of the board. On the up-side, they're cheap.
Transistors are a pretty basic 3-legged component. How come I don't see a lot of specially designed boards with 3-pads in a triangular shape? Most of what I see are straight line grids of holes and even more sophisticated IC designs.
Larry, thanks, I do have a dremel. madbomb, I'll see if I can get thinner wire and a pencil soldering iron. I have 2 irons already, I've gone from a thicker, apparently unremovable tip to a more powerful, fine tip and 2 more tips iron but terribly designed because it's too long and makes it unsteady to hold design. So at least now I know what to look for. I'll definitely look for that blue tack as both madbomb and GrumpyMike mentioned.
This is the smallest thing I have ever hand soldered. It is a bicoloured LED, with a connection in each corner.
As you can see it mounts between the tracks in strip board.
On 9024 image, each track is a long flat copper surface, basically a nice long flat wire?
The rectangles with numbers on them are the resistors whereas the 2-top-left and 2-bottom-left and the 34 top-right and 3-bottom-right slightly longer rectangles are transistors?
Wow! I'm going crazy taking apart old stuff.
Now that I know what they are. I wish I would have kept the optocoupler from an old Wall wart I threw away a few days ago.
What are those 2 ICs of which one is labeled U2? This is a small pcb from a battery-solar panel combination:
TL431 seems to be a shunt regulator. I thought this was a transistor at first because they look like a transistor. But I have been noticing that lots of things look like transistors
These black rectangles without letters are the transistors, right? Is there any way to find out what kind they are? I guess for R its just a matter of reading the letters on top of them:
GrumpyMike, so in post #18, when a rail connects two components and you want to use the rest of the rail for something else, you strip off the copper? Is that what the greyed out square shapes are?