Buy an Eagle Mk II, outfit it with your weapons of choice, A grade thrusters and shields (or biweave) and whatever you wanna try. Be sure to check power consumption as it's a pitfall with the smaller ships.
Fill the empty slots with hull packages to beef it up a bit and stick military armour on there. Good Distributor. The best sensors aren't required but I find it helps. And finally a kill warrant scanner E grade.
Will end up looking something like this:
https://coriolis.edcd.io/outfit/eag...10AykA.Aw18kA==..EweloBhAWEoUwIYHMA28QgIwV0A=
With a rebuy cost of just 106,000 credits it's a ship to make mistakes in.
Find a Navigation beacon (Not compromised) near the entry star, scan other ships by targeting them and looking at them. Learn to check their wanted/Clean status and the contacts tab to see how big the bounty is, also learn to check if they are in a wing.
When you find a wanted target line up behind them in the blind spot and fire away. You'll find there's usually police and bounty hunters around to help you fight these wanted targets, most are weak ships and smugglers so it hopefully shouldn't be too much of a challenge to take a few out and wet your feet. The important bits here are the basics of scanning, checking targets and learning to fly behind your opponent in the blind spot. The Eagle is perfect for this as it's fast, manoeuvrable and can pack a punch.
Also learn to use the kill warrant scanner to check for hidden bounties, you'll find that only a few ships are wanted so this area may quickly get boring, feel free to exit and re-enter to reset the spawn and see what the new dice-roll brings.
Feel free to swap out weapons and try different things, this is the learning phase, find out what happens if you friendly fire a police ship or accidentally ram a ship much bigger than you. It's cheap, have fun
Also lean how kinetic weapons and lasers affect shields and hull differently.
Once you feel you understand the basic mechanics we step up to the Res sites. Here the ship advice goes out the window. Viper III, Diamondback Scout/Explorer, Vulture, Cobra III, Courier, Eagles. Pick what you like the look of and want to fly with, any in that list there are good choices, I wouldn't go straight into a Fer De Lance or Python but it's totally up to you, at this stage I wouldn't want to advise people on ship choice.
Anyway, find a High/Low res site (not hazardous). Now there's still police but the enemy ships are more skilful, in bigger vessels and more frequent. Also you have dodging asteroids to contend with. Similar principals apply, stay in the blind spot, scan first before shooting and don't bite off more than you can chew. At this stage i'd advise messing with directional thrusters if you haven't already, they are one of the intermediate skills but one of the most useful. Sideways to strafe and vertical to increase or decrease your turn arc which can keep you close up to a target or extend the distance as desired. It'll also teach you about boosting, the Eagle in the first section is so fast often boost isn't required, in bigger slower ships using it at the right time is the difference between a quick evasive turn putting you perfectly in line to blast your opponents blind spot compared with at the wrong time overshooting your target and ending up in front of their guns.
If in a bigger ship maybe experiment with ramming as a tactic once their shields are down.
Engineering in this second stage helps but isn't required. As you get more and more confident you'll find yourself taking on bigger wings etc. Engineers makes it easy but if you can do it without it'll help later on.
Finally once you are picking off ships with ease and taking down multi thousand credit bounties you are pretty much into it. Hazardous RES and Compromised nav beacons are the same as the others but without police so tons more dangerous if you pick a fight you shouldn't have (which is why learning what you can take on in the early stages is vital). Flight Assist off, the most advanced skill to master can be a goal at this stage. I can't help with this but youtube has some cool videos and stuff. I think it's mostly practice that helps there. PvP fights and the like also come in this "extended skills" category, things that are absolutely not necessary for you to enjoy combat but can be good goals and aims to improve yourself as you keep doing combat.
I'd also add combat zones and Powerplay combat zones in this bracket. They feature military spec ships with high ranked pilots, good for increasing combat rank but an absolute pain to fight if you aren't in a big engineered ship or a really good pilot. The AI loves railguns and is darn effective with them too, if they decide you are the highest threat you can find 1v1 turns into 8v1 in the blink of an eye and you are retreating even in the biggest engineered ship.
Alien combat also comes into this category as you almost definitely need a group to succeed. Not my area of expertise I must say but I've seen a few vids that don't look promising to anyone that hasn't mastered the basics and intermediate steps.
Hopefully this helps, it's by no means a perfect guide but it's how I'd want to have learnt it if I had the chance to go back. It's also not a set formula, adjust as desired for your situation and requirements but I hopefully gave a few of the key points an airing for consideration
