The Pinecil is great, but is definitely a terrible recommendation for anyone new to soldering. If you're trying to encourage people to learn to solder, they should be doing it with a proper station that can handle and maintain temp for extended periods. I have a Pinecil, but it's really only useful for quick on-the-fly jobs (which it excels at, in my experience) so it stays in my tool bag for work. It suffers from overheating and temperature changes for more lengthy jobs.

Otherwise, yeah, if you're already competent at soldering and need a pocket-sized iron that you can create a portable power supply for, invest in a Pinecil