Starting to climb the nasty mountain called "learning curve"...

Plan on spending your first 8 hours of play getting lost, possibly blown up, learning the interface, asking newbie questions in "Rookie Help" or "Eve University", and finding your way around. The top tips off the top of my head are:

- Do the tutorial once. Maybe twice.

- In your home system, figure out how to get to an asteroid belt, how to mine, then go back and sell your load. Don't worry overmuch about the price for the first day. Just get some ISK in the bank. Any ISK is better then no ISK.

- Always have a skill being trained. If you're unsure, train a learning skill or any other short-period skill that will only take 1.0-1.5 hours (if you'll be online that long).

- The autopilot is both your friend and your enemy. Manually controlling jumps allows you to get within a few km of your destination, while the auto-pilot always stops 15km short. In friendly territory this won't matter (much), but in low security space it can be deadly.

- Bookmarks are handy when mining. They allow you to move back and forth between the rock that you found and the local station where you're selling the ore.

- Grab a copy of EveMon. This will take a lot of the guesswork out of knowing what skills you need to upgrade to fly a particular ship along with the *total* training time required.

After the first day, I decided to upgrade into a mining ship. It wasn't a big investment and it let me mine more efficiently. The newbie ship only has a cargo capacity of 120 cubic meters (m3). When I finished outfitting a Caldari Bantam, I had almost 360 m3 to play with. So I could pull 3x as much ore back to the station on each run.

Between purchasing the skill books, purchasing the ship, purchasing the shuttle to go get the ship, and the misc parts (mining lasers, cargo expanders), I spent somewhere between 150k and 250k ISK. That's about 25 mining runs in a newbie ship. But with the Bantam, I'm pulling in 25-30k per run to/from the asteroid belt so it pays for itself quickly. Training time was about 16-24 hours for the skills required (use EveMon to find out for your character).

The payback is quick enough that I don't feel I'll have to mine for the next 2 weeks to have made it worth it. It made a good 2-day project where I had to learn how to search the market for deals, travel to the system where I bought, pickup the items out of local storage, then freight them back to my home system. I did the hauling in my newbie ship since my skills weren't up far enough to fly the Bantam yet.

So not bad for a weekend of play. Now I'm trying to spec out the cost to upgrade to the next larger ship class along with the training time.