While the above are all good suggestions, it seems to me that you would be better served by starting with something easier and more fundamental.
Observe your opponents, specifically the person on your left and right since they influence your play a lot more than the rest, and you will be battling them for blinds over the evening.
Start small, and just keep track of how many pots they enter--later on you can try and keep track of whether they limped or raised--to get a rough idea of what they are playing. If they are entering almost every pot you can be pretty sure they are playing with very loose opening hands, if they are folding a lot they are probably playing tighter.
Just doing that you can gain a lot of information that will help you as you can narrow the kinds of hands they are likely to have when you are in a pot with them; if you are in a pot with a player you have identified as tight and the flop comes rags you should feel pretty confident that the flop missed them.
It may sound like an easy and trivial thing to watch for, but in a game a lot of things are going on and most new players spend too much time thinking about their own cards rather than paying attention to the little things around them.
Give it a shot and let us all know what you decided to do and how it worked out for you!
