I'm fairly new to Crypto-development too, so take my answer with a grain of salt.
Question 1It depends what type of cryptocurrency you're imagining. Many people are now creating tokens on top of Ethereum, which they have a guide for that here:
https://www.ethereum.org/tokenIf you want to model it after a certain coin, like Bitcoin, I would suggest visiting their Github Code, and potentially forking off of that.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoinThere's also a great, free course on Coursera by Princeton University.
Question 2If your cryptocurrency is good enough by the end of summer, and you can market it by yourself, you can have an ICO. This will raise capital for your coin to be further developed.