I have found this thread pretty useful, not sure how well his method works but it covers a lot of the basics and mentions a few books to help newbie traders.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60501.0

Yes you could heat your house with mining equipment but you'd need lot of machines, I wouldn't recommend it. Yes it requires energy to write a 1 or 0 to hard disk, computers are not magic sir.

^^ $100... expensive pizza

But yea it could reach $10000 in a few years if it continues to be adopted by business across the planet

Mainly to participate in group buys/shares as purchasing mining equipment is costly, and I move every three months (gonna be a haste to move equipment). Plus the abundence of information and inteligent people