If you don't want to bother yourself with too much details ( Sorry but some details are unavoidable ) you can buy a decent ready-made GPU mining rig for $4k or something like that. I guess that is comparable to the price of the ASIC miners you were planning to buy. Many of them come pre-configured and you just need to add your payout address. If you want to build your own rig, it can end up being cheaper and at least for me it is a nice learning experience if you like computer stuff. There is a ton of youtube videos that walk you through the details of building a rig.

From a Newbie to A Newbie follow the GPU advice. ASIC miners (for now) only implement SHA256 and Scrypt, the two hashing algorithms used for Bitcoin and Litecoin. These two markets are pretty well saturated with mining farms in countries with cheap electricity. For a starter you can buy a few GPUs ( if you have the money ) and mine the newer coins which use different hashing algos. The main pro is that GPUs can be configured to mine any new algo ( provided there is an available SW miner) so you can chase the most profitable coins. At the end of the day, if you got sick of mining, you still can sell your GPUs to the general public.

miningpoolhub lists coins according to their profitability for both AMD and nvidia GPUs. check it for more coins but as many have said ZEC, Vertcoin are among the most popular

I am new to the mining world. I am using ccminer for my nvidia GPU and I noticed that if I use the -f option, the pool shares are affected. i.e, if I use f -2, my pool shares double. Of course, there is a limit before I get so many bad shares. From my readings, I found this shouldn't be the case. Is this a bug in the pool settings ( it is a small pool )?

Nice miner  gives me 36 sol/sec on my 940MX laptop GPU. Nice work and waiting for further optimizations

Thanks for the addition. I am using my laptop GPU 940MX for ZEC mining  ( just for fun) and excavator gives 10% better hash rate the EWFB ( which was my previous best) . Thanks.