I am quite new to this as well, but FWIW, my advice would be:
- If you are asking how to get started from scratch, stay away from Bitcoin mining which requires dedicated hardware that may be obsolete by the time you receive it (unless you make really big investments but then it is not for newbie)
- I don't think buying cloud / mining contract is profitable either (why on earth would people sell these contracts if they could make more profit by using it themselves ? IMO opinion, most of them are trying to get ROI on their -obsolete- hardware investment this way)
So you are, imho, left with alt coins mining amongst which Litecoin is obviously the more well known (but probably not the most profitable). Most of these are base on a different algorithm (scrypt) which (as of today) is ASIC proof and can still be run on non dedicated hardware.
- You need a decent GPU for this. You can still have a go to it as a proof of concept with something like HD6870. But something more high end would be needed if you are serious about it (r9 280, r9 290 ...)
- If you are OK with command line cgminer is not very hard to use.
- You need a wallet for your currency of your choice (typically litecoin to start with)
- You will join a pool (mining solo except if you are running a big rig and / or mining a low difficulty coin is not an option IMO, especially as a starting point)
- So some example of putting things together can be watched here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4FFf_rO3HoNext possibilty is to mine some "CPU capable" coin, amongst which Ripple / XRP is quite an interesting concept. You share you CPU for good aims (like cancer research scientifixc calculation for instance), you'll be rewarde with some coins (XRP) at some point. more on this
https://ripple.com/ Don't expect to get rich this way though (unless XRP comes out to be a good concept and starts rocketting ...)
hope this helps.