Records
First of all, welcome to the club! Reloading is a magnificent obsession if you want it to be; a handy way to whip up a couple boxes of cheap ammo if that's what you want it to be. Most people seem to end up somewhere in between.
Waitone has it right--Write down everything you did, label the batches of ammo, keep different stuff separate. Reloading is all about being able to repeat what you did before, with each round, so the more you know about the brass, past performance with a give weapon, powder weight, etc, etc, etc, the better off you are. You almost can't do too much in the area of keeping records on your reloads, nor in the area of keeping different lots of brass separate.
Free range brass is very nice for $$. You may end up buying brass if "nobody" leaves your desired empties @ your local range, or if you want some REALLY uniform brass. Norma and Lapua are the 2 most expensive and best makers of rifle brass. Here again the name of the game is uniformity and repeatability.
Agree on ABC's of Reloading. Agree on buying every different manual you can get, and look up a prospective loading in each one. You may find a disagreement or 2 between the manuals. You can't read up too much on what you propose to do. Why re-invent the wheel?
Agree on the niceness of having a chronograph, but IMHO it is not needed in the first flush of reloading, but rather something you get once you have gotten good at the basics.
Ask other reloaders--They are generally very helpful and sharing with info about a particular procedure, what works or what doesn't.
DO NOT believe any source that reccommends juicing up a load considerably more than everybody else. No matter what the source. If you think you need the very hottest load a given cartridge is capable of using, what you really need is a different cartridge/weapon, where that level of hotness is midrange, not pushing the envelope.