mekeberiya,
Welcome to the forum. There is no simple answer, most of this science is complicated by many factors, it takes time to learn and you can learn many different ways.
I suggest starting with Hoke's book, study it and work on the getting acquainted experiments in her book, these introduce you to many important reactions that once understood will help you in so many different areas of understanding the chemistry involved, how some metals become troublemakers and understanding how to deal with them...
Start with an easy material when you are ready to begin simple materials with less metals (or troublesome metals) like memory fingers, sterling silver, or karat gold... study the all of the many different processes for testing recovery and refining, study everything you can find on each different topic....
Understand the principles and how it is done before you begin (search everything you can about it), you may have to read many different papers to get the larger picture, don't limit yourself in how much you study each subject, subtle important details may not be spoken of much as most everyone knows them or some details are just plain obscure, the more you understand the more successful you will be...
Guide to the forum, take the tour of the forum this will introduce many ideas.
General reaction list...
There is no one place to begin I liked the older posts they seemed to thrive with information. many times searching an author's posts will generate tons of information as the author discusses his trials and errors...
Safety is the best place to begin, there are so many unknown dangers, and we create very toxic gasses and waste. begin here.
Study is where you educate yourself and that education is more precious than gold, it is our education that gives us the ability to recover and refine or even find gold, so basically study is where you get gold.
I can give you a detailed map of where to find gold. it would do you no good, to begin you would have to understand how to read the map and interpret it, then you would have to know how to find gold or recognize it (lots of miners packed home a lot of fools gold before they learned what real gold was), you would have to know how to recover the gold, so basically I could put you on top of a mountain full of gold and it would do you no good without an education. education is how you get the gold. education takes time, so be patient and start learning it is free. the information is here waiting for you and the gold will still be in the mountain when you are ready...