I would recommend to go through the Babypips school so you can understand the basics. Even better to check it a few times while practicing on demo. As for the books, here you can find some good suggestions for the matter: Pipcrawler's Favorite Trading Books List of Best Forex Trading Books
By the way, I think that most brokers offer web version of Meta Trader, so you if you like this kind of platform you can check it. Otherwise, there are many brokers with different kinds of platforms, MT5 is not bad as well but it all depends on what you are looking for. You can try different demo accounts with different platforms until you understand which suits you better.