As a total NOOB to bitcoin but a long time computer user I was intrigued when a digital currency (Bitcoin) was trading for a lot of real money. Then when I found out I could put my computer to work making some money for me I thought to myself that I just had to try that.
Then when I went to get started I found out that there was a pretty steep learning curve! In an effort to help out any other novices who are looking to start mining currencies here are a few things that I've learned.
First: There are a lot of digital currencies out there! Bitcoin is the best known and trades for about $900 Canadian Dollars last time I looked. Each coin has its pro's and con's.
Second: Each digital currency has a different potential for profit. Some, like bitcoin, are very difficult to make without specialized equipment. Others like Infinium-8 have lost interest of the developer and are now worthless.
Third: These coins tend to be hard to spend so finding a good exchange to convert them to spendable money is important.
In my readings here's what I've concluded. I'm not an expert so take the information as a starting point only for your own research.
The 'original' coin was bitcoin and it used scrypt to mine it. There are special machines (ASICS) which run scrypt very fast and make using your computer of graphics card to mine worthless. I spend 4hrs using my video card to get about 1 satoshi (about 1/1500th of a penny). I would stay away from scrypt based cins like bitcoin and litecoin as a starting point if you want to make money.
If you have a good video card and want to make some digital currency (cryptocoin) then Ethereum is likely a good bet. It is well known and traded on many currency exchanges. There aren't ASICS to mine it, and CPU's mine it slowly, so it is very well geared to video card mining. There are two varieties ETH (Ethereum) and ETC (Ethereum Classic). It seems someone hijacked the original Ethereum (ETC) so a second version or fork came out (ETH). Either way, its a coin to look at if you want to use your graphics card to mine. As a side note, the Ethereum has been having some denial of service attacks against it for the past month (september/october 2016) so its not as attractive until those attacks wane.
If you aren't using specialized equipment and don't have a good videocard then your likely going to want to mine using the cryptonight algorithm. That is a coin mining algorithm which uses a lot of CPU power and L3 cache making ASICS unlikely to come out for it, and video cards not as superior as they are for Ethereum. It can be successfully mined on something as low power as a cellphone to much more powerful machines. Monero is one of the most popular cryptonight type coins although there are others like fantomcoin, quasarcoin, and bytecoin.
Whatever coin you are mining you are probably going to want to join a mining pool. The reason is simple, it takes a very long time for any single computer to mine a digital currency. The solution is to have a bunch of computers joined in a pool and all the computers share in the reward. For a very simple introduction to cryptocoins mining and an easy way to join a pool I use minergate (available at www.minergate.com). It allows for Ethereum mining, Monero mining and others.
If your computer really isn't up to the task you could always try forging NXT. NXT coin is a little different in that all the coins are already mined. When you run their software you are providing the network for NXT transactions. You get a portion of the transaction fees based on how many NXT coins you hold. The more NXT you have the more you make.
Of course, there is also STEEM coins which you probably know about if you are here. Post good articles and make STEEM coins. They can also be mined but I wasn't able to myself as I kept getting error messages.
Last thought, once you have coins of a particular type you'll need to exchange them. Changelly, Kraken, Hitbtc and other exchanges all exist so you can take one coin (like Monero) and convert it to another (like bitcoin). That's very important because if you want to get really money, or spend your coins your likely going to have to switch the coins to bitcoin.
Anyways, that's my first post and first impressions on cryptocoin mining. Thanks for reading and enjoy!