-Long-Distance Real Estate Investing: How to Buy, Rehab, and Manage Out of State Rental properties-Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, RepeatFor personal finance, I recommend The Simple Path to Wealth by JL CollinsHappy reading/listening!

Plain and simple. 

There are a number of markets within easy reach of me that look good on paper, and I wondered if the BiggerPockets community has any advice about how I should educate myself before purchasing my first property.

It's actually pretty simple to do. 

Cleanup is amazing.....just throw away the paper towels you cooked on top of :))

For us, as self-managing DIY landlords in low-income rentals, a very simple thing we've done from the beginning is that we have never tried to outdress or outdrive our tenants.

You may be able to offset your lack of paper credibility with additional rental income and personality.

Equity is just the paper .

A simple search on the tax assessors site gives me names and I think I'll just message them on social media.

there is more to it than that once you get into the commercial world, but the basic concept of cap rate is pretty simple.