I own that book that TimeOBrien posted about. Excellent starter book.
Check out n-Track. It's an audio/MIDI sequencer, handles both VST and DirectX plugins, as well as VST and DX instruments. It comes with a few good effects as well, like EQ and compression. It's also a lot cheaper than the big name products, and I know a lot of people here use it as their only multi tracker. The program recognizes nearly all sound cards, and defaults to it, so all you really need to do to get started is hit the record button and it will make the track for you and start recording your input. It contains a little tutorial to help you get started, but a nice little manual, and of course, you can get help from other n-track users.
All multi-trackers look daunting and confusing at first, but with a little toying around, you can figure stuff out. You can grab two songs from their website to open up in n-Track to see a bit of what you can do with it.
Just spend a little time, and almost any program should be fine for you.
