Well, first you'd need to define what you mean precisely by saying "new at all of this" because this hobby aka radio monitoring aka scanning and aka all sorts of things is rather complicated overall.
Welcome to the forum, and I myself am a Las Vegas coming up on 20 years now living in the downtown area. Can't say I can offer much info in terms of "hands on" as all I've got nowadays is my trusty laptop and an RTL stick or two aka "cheap USB TV tuner" that allows me to use SDR applications (SDR = Software Defined Radio) to control the tuner on the USB stick and do all sorts of cool stuff and at a ridiculously low price (free software and ~$10 for the stick itself, few bucks more for the hardware to construct an antenna or two).
It's a fun hobby overall, some folks like myself just choose to listen as I've done for 40+ years now to radio of all kinds, be it regular AM/FM stuff, Shortwave aka HF, and of course into the higher frequencies using traditional "police scanners" over the years, and now moving into what many of us consider to be the future of our hobby/hobbies: the computer controlled software defined radio aspects which can and do allow for a lot more potential than just any old "police scanner" regardless of price or complexity.
So... ask questions, participate, and most of all have fun, always...
