My very first grow was with coco coir. I learned alot on that grow and I think it is the best for a first timer to use. It will let you gauge the way your plants react to different situations, and (in most cases), is easy enough to correct, pretty forgiving in other words. When I say act on it, I mean find out what the problem is and adjust your nutes or ph according to the situation, or flush it if need be. And if your have aspirations of doing a hydro grow later on, you'll already have the basics of ph'ing water, adding nutes at different levels at different stages of the plant's life cycle. When I done my first hydro grow, I still had to do some research on the things I didn't know about with hydro, but I already knew the basics just from using the coir. I'm using soil for 2 grows that I just dropped beans on today. So I'll probably be studying the guides for soil growers now, but like I mentioned before, doing coir gave me heads up on 2 types of grows, and with soil I have a little bit of a heads up on, but not enough to be real confident of a nice grow. Coir is easy to correct problems with, hydro is really easy to fix most problems with, but soil is a different matter. With soil you have to consider all the nutes that are in it to start with. If you build a "super-soil" it'll have all the nutes you need, but that could also lead toward nute burn pretty quick, and it's tough to flush out if that's the case. It's really not rocket science with coir, and it gets your feet wet (no pun intended) when it comes time to try a hydro.