Hello David,
Well you've decided to tread a path that many thousands of people have chosen. It will be hard but rewarding work.
Firstly, I must point out that you have posted in the wrong forum. Since this is your first post, we will forgive you :-)
There is a whole forum dedicated to wannabees, and as you can imagine, you're not the first to ask these questions. For this reason the moderators on here have set up a sticky which provides links to threads that answer pretty much all the questions you will have. Take a look here:
http://www.pprune.com/forums/showthr...hreadid=131649
Good luck
Bodie