Randomaire,
Well I've been a member of this site for about a year, and I'm finally making my first post.
I got my first Guitar for Christmas 2005. I found this site immediately after doing a search for fingerstyle lessons. Keep in mind that I wanted to learn fingerstyle. My voice isn't that great for singing, so I wanted the guitar to sing for me. This site has been great, but keep in mind that it serves up the style I want to play.
One book that helped me a great deal in the beginning was "Guitar for Dummies". It has some good beginner songs that you can strum with just a couple of basic chords.
The other thing I got that helped me a great deal was
Guitar Pro 5. You can download Kirks lessons and not have to keep replaying the middies. You can also rearrange the lessons, single out the melody vs the bass line, marry multiple Tab's lessons on a single song into a single tab.
Within the first year I have a play list of about 10 songs(Father and Son and Kirks rendition of Amazing Grace our my best). Doesn't seem like much, but after a year my learning curve is vastly improved. I'm beginning to play basic melodies by ear off of one basic scale (C Major). I'm a long way from being ready to post a recording of my playing, but I'm a lot better than I was a year ago.
A real easy picking pattern that you can try to sing along with is Dust in the Wind by Kansas. It's an arpeggio over a couple of basic chords and a quick learn. My greatest moment was walking into a guitar store after about 3 months of playing and having the salesman recoginze the song when I played it.
The lesson for me is patience, practice and perserverance. One thing I found that helped immensely was when I got to a plateau on one song, I'd take a break from it and go to another song for something fresh and new. Soon my warm up would be my early melodies (On top of old smokey, Tom Dooley, to name a couple) and progress through the tougher ones. It can be tedious and redundant at times, but nothing good comes without work. Keep trying you'll get there if the desire is real.
Good Luck
Don