The Sparkfun boards already have everything on it. They are meant to be little 'modules' that you can just wire together yourself how you want. The price reflects this though. Obviously the less you DIY the more you pay when building things like these. You can just check out the site. If they don't have a breakout board for the chips you want to work with, then you are out of luck and need to look at those adapters.
Everything is going SMD, though. DIP parts get fewer and fewer every year. If you plan to get into this, it would be beneficial to try making your own boards and practice soldering SMD's yourself. You can check youtube video's for instruction on that.