Hand loading can be as expensive or as inexpensive, as fast or as slow, as exact or as loosey-goosey, as run-of-the-mill or cutting edge, as up-to-the-minute or as retro, as you want it to be. Sometimes I like to just sit and load brass shotgun shells with a hand primer, a stick I whittled to barely fit inside of the shells, wads I cut from cardboard using a chamfered pistol cartridge in the right caliber, a hammer.... and some melted beeswax. I suppose if I really, really, wanted to go completely low tech I could figure out how to de-prime without a press and how to prime without a store-bought priming tool. But that would be just too much of an affectation, because bottom line, there really isn't any truly low tech with cartridge firearms. I always advise buying cheap equipment to start and working up after you are sure you really want to hand load stuff, but buying good manuals appropriate to the kind of loading one plans to do... AND READING THEM! The Lee and Lyman manuals are the most generally applicable because they aren't solely written to hawk proprietary components... but whatever manuals a new hand loader looks at they should read the general conceptual part a few times before going to a specific caliber and starting to assemble ammunition. The devil isn't entirely in the details. It's just as much in having a clear understanding of general concepts many of which change somewhat from pistol, to rifle, to shotgun... and moreso, much, much, moreso for "black" as opposed to smokeless powder. Take smokeless powder concepts to loading black powder, and you can seriously blow something up (possibly yourself) in short order... and to some extent, vice versa. I specialize in loading almost everything under the sun, some of which involves cardboard templates to cut paper cartridges or paper-patched (wrapped) bullets, but as of yet I still haven't gotten around to buying any Dillon presses.