Seems to me that there are a lot of newcomers to the hobby. Welcome to the addiction!

If you read a lot of the posts on here, you will see a lot of people giving some variation of the following advice:

1) Get an instructor. Not only for learning to fly (which is very important by itself), but also for answers to common questions like balancing the plane, starting the engine, break-in, etc. If you have a good instructor, they should be able to help you not only with learning to fly, but also learning the other parts that you need to know. Also they are a good source of advice on 2nd planes, repairing your plane, etc.

2) Join a club. This can be very important for keeping a flying site. Our club flys at a city park and has its meetings at a city recreation center. Every month, someone from the city "just happens to" peek their head in the door to see how many people are there. If only 3 or 4 people came to the meeting, that shows the city that shutting down the park for RC would not affect them that much, as not many voters are using it for RC anyway. Plus, the people you meet in the club. You will get to a point that flying by yourself can be boring without other like-minded addicted guys to talk to.

3) Support your LHS (local hobby shop). They can be some of the most knowledgeable people you will run into. They go to the trade shows, know the manufacturer rep, etc. If you get friendly with the airplane guy at the shop, he can guide you also. The shop will not carry junk (at least mine will not). The manager of my LHS has been flying for 20 years. He will not carry anything that he would not want in his own hangar.

I hope this helps everyone that is getting into this hobby. I am not knocking RCU by leaving them out of the above list. RCU can be a great source of information. But when someone says they cannot get their engine tuned properly, it is hard to diagnose the problem without hearing the engine.