Buying asics as chips or a miner?

[infobiactrader]

I'm new to the bitcoin community and I want to get involved in the mining process because I think it seems cool. In my initial research,  I've found that the actual asic chips tend to be substantially cheaper and as far as I can tell, assembly isn't that difficult. I don't want to jump in and buy ten Avalon chips just to find that they're useless though... Any recommendations for building versus buying?