Hello Ragesdad, welcome to the forum,
I would start with Hoke's book, along with a few test tubes or other small scale improvised lab equipment (much of which can be found in the kitchen section of your second-hand stores).
Doing the getting acquainted experiments she suggests in her book, by doing these small tests with relatively pure metals or relatively clean scrap material, will give you an invaluable insight into how these metals react when we begin to manipulate their atomic structures and make ions out of atoms and atoms out of ions or salts of metals and acids by moving electrons from one to the other...
Also, I feel learning the basic principles of treating and dealing with waste, along with the study of working with these metals and acids the study helps you to learn to protect yourself and others from the dangers, as well as learning of the dangers you may be unaware of, in this study you will also learn many of the very important principles we use in the chemistry to manipulate the atoms of these metals, the study will help you improve your overall understanding of the recovery and of the refining processes, things like how pH can change the chemical behavior, how one metal can displace or replace another metal or a batch of metals from solution (often called cementing a metal from solution), besides learning to deal with waste you will learn many important principles involved in the chemical manipulations of these precious metals that are needed to become successful at recovery or refining of these metals.
Then begin to learn some of the workarounds, such as the cupric chloride leach (wrongly called acid peroxide leach), or how HCl acid (sold commercially as a cement etchant or cleaner) and household bleach can be a workaround to dissolve gold as opposed to using aqua regia, as well as many others here on the forum such as how to make your own reagents like copperas to precipitate or test for gold in solution...
Again begin your learning by working in small experiments (test tube size), and working with better materials to begin learning on, such as clean memory fingers or karat gold, or sterling silver.
it would also be helpful if you beginning your learning and experiments with the use of higher-grade scrap (without tin or solder or the problem metals) this will help you to become more familiar with the chemical reactions and with problems that will develop even without the problems of the other metals like tin involved (that can and will rob you of your gold), giving you experience without adding these other problems to deal with, making it easier to understand the problem of tin and some others...
Once you learn to manipulate the purer metals or scrap, working with general electronic scrap or rock ores will be easier as you will have a base understanding without many of the more difficult problems of recovery or refining...
