New to DIY Electronics - Need Equipment Suggestions

IronLlama reporting in.

I'm totally new to DIY Electronics (as evidenced by my one other thread here). I got John Boxall's book Arduino Workshop, and then I found the Starter Kit projects. I am leaning towards the latter as a beginner set of exercises now, because I'm having a lot of trouble finding the right equipment. Ah yes, equipment.

I need input on the basic, cheap, starter gear that can get me going.

Arduino Starter Kit (hence placement in this forum):

Basic Electrical Toolkit
http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=105&cp_id=10509&cs_id=1050905&p_id=8141&seq=1&format=2

This is the cheapest basic toolkit I've ever seen by far, so much so that it worries me, as often cheap == terrible. But it comes with a digital multimeter, a soldering iron, and other little basic tools I otherwise do not own. I hopefully won't get dinged by import cases either. I did some reading on multimeters, and multiple sources recommend Fluke electronics, but I honestly don't have $160 to dunk into this hobby just for one of the necessary tools. Do you think this toolkit will be sufficient to start? I will, of course, upgrade in the future if my endeavours are successful. Ah yes, endeavours.

I'm looking to focus mostly on home automation, and maybe a little bit of robotics. But I didn't want to dive right into a subgenre of DIY without going for something like the Starter Kit to get my head around hardware in general. Any general guidance is greatly appreciated and also, sorry if this is a bad spot for this thread. Still learning the ropes around here.

yea it looks cheap, but its totally fine for getting started cause it doesnt take much to get things done in electronics

Thanks for the advice. I figured as much. I ordered it yesterday so here's hoping it's not DOA or anything.