The BEST thing to do is to find the club in your area and go visit their field. There is far too much info you need to know than you can get from the forums. We can give you some very good advise, but there's nothing like seeing it up close and personal.

You'll need to get with a club anyway for instruction. It is VERY unadvisable to try this without help of some kind. Read some of the posts here, you'll find that most of the people who tried to fly without help carried their planes home in pieces.

Now of course, one or two people may chime in here to say that THEY flew sucessfully on their own, but the other 99% are usually too embarrassed to say they crashed.