Keep in mind that getting meltdown to work might be very difficult depending on your setup. I wouldn't have been able to at least when starting out my teacher didn't provide us with targetable hardware.
A spectre (particularly RSB-based ones) are nice to start out with imo.
Yea fair, this is obviously a high level overview. I think I found with meltdown that I needed the assembly code. I also was able to reproduce it with actual C code if I recall correctly but that was way more finnicky.
A spectre (particularly RSB-based ones) are nice to start out with imo.