Mining is a much safer investment than buying the coins directly for several reasons but ultimately what you need to understand is your cost of power and can you get it cheap enough to make it worth it. Unfortunately I don't have much time to go through all of it right now but if you can get power at around 10 cents per kilowatt or less let then you may want to look into it further.
Check out mining YouTubers they provide a lot of information I'm sure that you can get what you're looking for.
GL
The only time mining has ever been shown to be better than flat out buying coins is when there is no liquidity with a coin and the coin price is significantly higher than the difficulty equivalent. Considering that algo switching miners have been around for almost 5 years and that there's tons of exchanges today compared to just MtGox in 2011, it's pretty much impossible for that to occur with the exception of a brand new minted coin - and how many coins in the last 3 years are something worthwhile and not just another "I ran".
This is coming from somebody who has been mining BTC since it was in the $2 range. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but had I know 1 decade ago what I know now, I would have kept buying pretty much all my holdings and would easily have come out ahead.
The only reason to mine these days would be for anonymity of any block you happen to mint.