This Kaggle "Getting Started" Competition provides an ideal starting place for people who may not have a lot of experience in data science and machine learning. The data is highly structured, and we provide tutorials of increasing complexity for using Excel, Python, pandas in Python, and a Random Forest in Python (see links in the sidebar). We also have links to tutorials using R instead. Please use the forums freely and as much as you like. There is no such thing as a stupid question; we guarantee someone else will be wondering the same thing!