@Scareth, There is a rake of tutorials that will get you pointing in roughly the right direction, there is also a dedicated section of the forums for new players, most of the stumbling blocks you will encounter will have been discussed so you can almost treat that section of the forum as a FAQ, in the banner for that section there is a link to a discord server galactic academy or something similar.
Once you've got over the basics of launch, fly, jump, dock you can look at taking on missions and doing some trading / cargo or passenger missions / fighting / mining / exploring whatever, basically you are free to pick and chose what you do. The game has a very complex political engine running behind the scenes, the so called background simulation, learning a bit about this will make the game make more sense to you. Essentially in most starports there are a number of factions offering missions, you'll have a standing with each faction - reputation. Doing good stuff for the faction gets you a gain in reputation, doing bad stuff against the faction lowers your reputation with them. The various missions each faction offers usually have a reputation requirement on them, the better the missions rewards the more demanding the reputation requirements will be. Essentially they aren't going to award the juiciest contracts to folks they don't really like. As you build up a bit of reputation, you will get better paying contracts, and you'll end up with a bit of money in the bank. You can then upgrade your ship, and start to be savvy, curry some favour with local factions, then it all sort of dovetails and gains momentum.
When I was a noob I made my first real money doing missions running small amounts of narcotics into starports, I also did some ground assault missions for the same guys who were giving me drug courier missions. Both of those play styles paid well so I could then upgrade my ship and take on conflict zones. Another thing I used to do was go to high Resourse Extraction Sites, mining sites in asteroid tings around planets, and shoot up pirates. In High res you get cops present, so there is a way of learning to use the cops to your advantage essentially as wingmen, you find a ship that is WANTED (target it and scan it, make sure you see the wanted on it, or you'll become wanted yourself if you shoot it, and all kinds of firepower gets targetted at you) so you can then shoot it, with the help of the police you kill much bigger ships, which have higher bounties on them, much quicker and with much less chance of getting killed. If you do the bounty hunting in a system you are regularly visiting, yougain rep by handing in those bounties, then you can get better paying missions.
I'm not going to turn this into an absolute great wall of text, I think its currently just a parapet and a nice place to stop, but by all means, after you have done the tutorials, have a look around, read some threads, ask some questions, and hopefully find yourself immersed in the game.
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