So, I have a project in mind that involves much higher voltage than your average breadboard. Where do I go to learn how to not kill myself or burn my house down?

I assume you're talking about standard (for the US) 115v 15 amp wiring.

In all honesty it isn't that tough to do, that being said, you should pick up a copy of the local electrical code even though nobody's going to be checking up on your work.

I learned how to do it from my Dad, so I'm not sure what books or videos you're going to want to use. But, electrical work is pretty easy to learn and quite safe as long as you're careful.

You're not likely to burn down your house as long as you use wire that's large enough for the current, and don't put too many things on the same breaker. While you're at the breaker if you see any of the breakers being larger than 15 amps, you'll need to get an electrician to come in and fix the problem as it's a fairly substantial fire hazard. Plus, you don't want to have that much stuff on the same circuit anyways.

If you're working near water you'll need to make sure that the circuit uses Ground fault Interrupt gear, you'll be working with the power off, that's just in case something happens. IIRC you can probably get an electrician to add that in the breaker box for those circuits.

Last bit of advice, the wires are always hot even when you shut the breaker off, the only people I've known about who were killed while working on wiring were handing something that was unexpectedly hot. Residential wiring is mostly safe as long as you're not grounded. I've been shocked a fair few times and the thing you're specifically trying to avoid is having current go through your heart. It can potentially change the rhythm or stop it all together. With higher voltages you can be thrown.

Hmm thanks. I was actually thinking of making something that would draw from a socket. The draw might be big enough to warrant care, though, which is why I'm asking. I don't want to build something and have the wires suddenly catch fire because I'm sucking too much juice through too small of a wire, for example.

No need to go through all that trouble with such an elaborate set up, just grow the pot in your garden. The cops probably won't see it.

Oh, well that should be pretty easy to do. Bear in mind though that wiring a transformer into a power outlet is pretty much trivial to do. Depending upon the specifics you can probably just use the extra set of connections on the other side of the outlet and add a junction box next to it to hold the connections.

What's going to cause something like this to catch fire is the resistance. Resistance causes heat and when fires start by electrical faults it's because of a build up in heat in a confined space. If you're using sufficiently large wire, keeping the connections good and tight the likelihood of a fire is pretty much non-existent.

I'm not sure how much juice you're looking at, but if it's less than 350 watts or so you shouldn't have too much to worry about as there'd be plenty of capacity on the line, provided you have a sensible number of circuits in the house. That's about as much juice as a high end blender.