This post is dedicated to my fellow QA & test newbie-wannabe. I know I had a lot of trouble gathering materials to understand how to go about. In the world today the importance of quality assurance and testing in software development has grown and is much focused on. Not to mention, the search results on the keywords lead to several places for knowledge bundles but quite difficult to find the first step on climbing the ladder. I hope my experience can help some of you out there to start climbing. So here are some wonderful links that helped me understand the basics of testing and quality assurance ( also adding experience).
http://www.robdavispe.com/free
http://softwaretesting-faq.blogspot.com
It’s quite a lot to understand about and lots of terms to recall. You don’t have to memorize them all. 
Just refer to them whenever you need to look it up.
One great forum that you can always look into for different questions in different categories is http://www.sqaforums.com
If you have any trouble understanding a particular topic/term, you can always Google it up. Feel free to leave me comments if it has helped you or not.
Till then, enjoy climbing your first step !
