My solder is 0.8, suppose I can look at ordering a roll of smaller one. Anything in particular I should look for?
Personally I favor 0.5mm and thinner for smd work. The thicker solder wire can be made to work, but you'll have to transfer it with the solder iron tip, which means the flux in the solder will be gone by the time it gets to the part, hence other posters recomendation to rely on manual flux application. I've seen people literally bathe parts in flux with good results, so there's really no amount that's too much.
How do you get the chip to stay put, is there a glue I can use that won't melt at solder temps? I suppose this would be easier if I had an actual circuit board but since I want to prototype and not actually get a board made I need a way to solder it to a perf board. I have solder paste as well if that might be easier. Never worked with it before and don't have a reflow or toaster oven though. Would heat gun work? I can maybe look at hooking up my camera to HDMI with macro lens for magnification. Though the slight video delay would make it a bit awkward I think.
Solder a corner pin (it doesn't matter if you get bridged pins), then a pin on the opposite side. Solder the rest of the pins, then at the end clean up the bridges that might have occurred at the beginning by draging the iron tip along the pins, from the inside to the outside. If that doesn't work, use a bit of solder wick (if you don't have any, create some yourself by dousing some stranded wire with flux) to remove the excess solder.
Heat guns and the like are a bad idea because they're very imprecise and can very easily overheat a part and damage it (and you have no way reliably knowing that it even happened), and the air flow can blow away small parts. They kinda work for desoldering parts when you're going to throw the parts away anyhow.
Solder paste I find only useful for reflow soldering, not hand soldering.
Some people find magnification helps, but since I'm short sighted anyway, I usually just replace my glasses with (uncorrected) safety glasses and enjoy the natural magnification effect
If I can't do that because I chose to wear contacts that day, I found loupe lamps quite nice, since they magnify and give you good lighting at the same time. Plus, they're a lot cheaper than useful electronic setup.
As a side note, how do you stop the PC pin plastic from melting when soldering PC pin headers? Figured I'd start by making the 8 pin board and half of the pins just sink through plastic from the solder heat.
First realize that not all plastic is equal, some will melt at 150°C (for a famous example, see Dave's plasma repair attempt), and other plastic is designed to withstand the 260°C reflow temperature profile. If you they're more frustrating than useful, throw away the cheap ebay special headers and buy brand name ones from mouser or wherever that come with a datasheet that says they'll withstand higher temperatures. In any case, when hand soldering, it comes down to being reasonably quick and not using a higher iron temperature than necessary. It helps slightly if you put something on the header that acts as a heatsink, like a socket or aligator clip, if your iron can deliver the heatflow.
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