I agree with mrburnette but there is one consideration about the Arduino as ISP I'd like to point out in case you might miss it in your searching:
Issue with Arduino as ISP and Mega 2560(gets kind of off topic so you need to read to the end but skip over the USBasp stuff: Program doesn't run after Upload Using Programmer with USBasp (Mega2560) · Issue #246 · arduino/ArduinoCore-avr · GitHub
Note that this issue was fixed by updating to avrdude 6.3 but Arduino IDE has since reverted to avrdude 6.0.1 so they have returned.
When I was getting started with Arduino I quickly found need for a programmer, I didn't want to have to rig up an Arduino as ISP every time so I thought it would be a fun project to make a dedicated device using an ATmega168 on stripboard. Soon after that I encountered the issue I linked to above as well as another limitation that has since been fixed in the ArduinoISP sketch. I decided to just get the top of the line professional tool, the Atmel AVRISP mkII, the last programmer I would ever need to buy. Come to find out there was a bug with AVRDUDE and Windows that made that programmer not work for me(workarounds and fixes have since been found). Now I have settled on the ultra cheap USBasp clones with an updated firmware as my favorite, it works for every situation. I still have all the others, including USBtinyISP, sitting in a box but they only come out for testing. The USBasp lives on my workbench.