Just like Striek said, definitely start with a dummies book and work your way to cisco books. After you finish the dummies book I would reccommend looking at the OSI model and how each part builds on another. When I first started, I bought myself 5 cisco routers and basically setup a lan to get started. After I did that things came together for me and made sense, where as I read books and books and nothing made sense till I got my hands dirty. You might need to do the same yourself. If you do want to buy equipment I definitely recommend EBAY. If you have the basics down with microsoft, get some unix/linux books then use a bootable distro "knoppix" and start playing around and getting yourself fimilar.