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All good advice here.

I taught myself with the Garrison/Carmichael book, but the Cattenach and Mauer books would have been easier to follow. I'm also a bit of a gearhead so and had to see if I could make my own forms, but if I had to do it over I would buy them. You van make first-angle and roughing forms out of maple or oak on a table saw (instructions in most books)

Next get a decent standard-angle block plane, replace the blade with a Hock, get a micrometer, a setting gage for the forms, get a knife of some king to use as a froe, a sharpening stone and guide, a bastard file, order a few culms of bamboo, and that's all you really need to start. You can flame-temper your first rod, use Titebond 3, hand-bind the glued blank off a spool of thread, wipe-on the varnish, bench-fit the ferrules, and use a pre-formed grip. Then wrap and varnish the guides as if you were making a graphite rod. Don't overthink this; making a basic fishable bamboo fly rod is not that big of a deal. The devil is in the details, but that won't be appearant until you make a few rods, and besides you'll be having too much fun to notice at first.

The main thing is to start planing cane. Get a feel for it, see how it shaves, learn to control chips and tears, and to learn to make long untapered triangles. After a while you'll be making long tapered triangles, and before you know it you'll be holding a finished rod. Once you jump in it just sort of happens.

After you make several this way you'll start finding all sorts of ways to spend money on rodmaking. It's a slippery slope.

I have a part-time bamboo rodmaking business (celebrated 10 years this past July 15th) and a shop full of tools, machines, and equipment. I sometimes laugh when I look at my first forms sitting in the corner and think I could once carry everything I needed to make a rod in a box under my arm.

Chuck