I want to jump straight at Arch. Honestly that's a little crazy, i know.. i have little exp. With terminals, i haven't been using Linux for more that 4 months (Ubuntu), But Arch is the whole reason i got into Linux in the first place. I posted a thread about booting it from a USB .. and i was accused of being lazy and that i was crazy if i thought i could boot Arch with no problems. so now im asking this: what can i do to prepare my self for a full installation of Arch. i don't care how long it will take me thats fine. i want to know what i need to do.. what do i research? what do i study? Dont fucking tell me to go Google it... no. im asking the web personally. im honestly waiting for that down to earth response from Lucid 
i am going to tell you to fucking google it, which should return the documentation for arch. Arch linux may be a royal PITA to install, but it also has some of the most complete documentation out there, of any distro. So google for it, or check our ebooks section, and read the docs. I had a brief experiment with arch on a VM but abandoned that due to time constraints, i will return one day!
My advice? Get a dedicated machine you can install it on though, arch is a finnicky distro and in my experience doing a LiveCD (or USB) boot is always a bit harder than running it from a HDD. So i would suggest keeping a copy of the docs on hand, either on another machine in ebook or printed somehow, then just following their install guide and trying to get it set up as a permanent install on a HDD. Or as a dual boot if you only have one comp. Once you have that down, and feel more comfortable getting around within Arch, then you might look into a USB boot device. But overall, it's a tough one and takes a little time and dedication (which you say you have, kudos) but if you have those then its deffo learning as you get reallll messy with the guts of linux and you'll learn a shit ton. Be prepared to wipe and re-install a lot, and dont let that frustrate you as it's a learning process. Shoot, when I learned Debian i reinstalled it 3 times in the first week and another like 5 tiems in the 2 weeks after that haha. Just messing around with my first linux distro, and not letting those reinstalls discourage me allowed me to learn sooo much though. I am now extremely comfortable in my debian environment, and have expanded to slackware on a diff machine to learn that. Eventually I'll return to Arch and then Gentoo...
To summarize, read the docs before and during the install, have google ready to google specific problems (like, XYZ showed up on my screen so google that XYZ with the word Arch and see what pops up.) and be prepared for lots of troubleshooting and re-installing if you bork it. Sometimes it's easier to re-install than it is to try and re-install only certain dependencies or libraries you may have messed up or rm'd lol.
Cheers man, i wish you luck ^_^
