[uzi]

What's your end goal? What do you hope to achieve? For me, I wanted to get to be good before I had kids, so I totally immersed myself for a little while for fun. Now I have a 2 month old little girl and I've backed off, but I'm happy with the photos I'm taking of her.

The suggestion of http://photo.net/ is a good one. I'd also recommend http://dpreview.com/ for gear and http://photosig.com/ as a place that you can see other peoples' work, critique and be critiqued.

The "National Geographic Photography Field Guide, 2nd Ed." was an amazing book that got me started in terms of understanding photography. (And it looks like it's been replaced with the "National Geographic: The Ultimate Field Guide to Photography".) The book essential is in two halves. The first half talks about the mechanics of photography... how shutter speed relates to aperture relates to film/sensor sensitivity (ISO) relates to focal length relates to distance to the subject relates to... etc. All of that is half of what I think you really need to know in terms of the mechanics. The other half is light. The second half of the book talks about a myriad of photo subjects and the approaches to photographing them, rules of photography (in terms of composition) and so forth.

As you get to know more, you'll see that your question is kind of like "How to get started with computers?" There's so much to it, it's hard to say. Perhaps your goals warrant a Digital SLR, perhaps they don't. I can tell you this, though... a good photographer with a bad camera can take better photos than a bad photographer with a good camera.