Congrats, RBBenson, on your first step.

I did the same last month.  I encourage you to go through the Installation guide very carefully -- reading even the things that don't seem to matter yet -- and you will be able to make it work (Oh, and writing down exactly what you do as you do it might help for debugging/asking for help later).  Probably the toughest part for a newbie is creating the db, setting the permissions, and getting the connectionstring correct.  But with a little help from this forum, you'll do great!

Ellen

A second step and I found a first speed bump. There appears a difficulty with the web.config file. Per the instruction in the "book", Chapter #3, page 55, there is a file to be renamed. This file in the solution explorer is named release.config and is to be renamed, web.config. The problem now is that there is 'already' a file named web.config. A second pass of compiling DNN does suceed to launch the DNN portal, log in as admin and host, change passwords, but there are a few errors where in the web.config file, there are lines of code where the "requiredPermission" attribute needs to be declared.