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I bought a book, its called Astronomy by Ian Ridpath, it has all the constellations, star charts and a heap of stuff about scopes and observation techniques etc etc, but I predominantly use it for the constellations as each one has some features of interest, so on a particular night I will pick say Sagittarius and go and hunt around there for as much stuff as I can find, a good 'hard' one to look for is Centaurus A in Centaurus, if you don't have star maps you need to print some out then refer to them at night, plan your session and try and hunt everything down, tonight when the moon sets at around midnight I am planning to go out to my dark location for some hunting and I hope to stay there until Andromeda rises, then maybe orion nebula.
The mistake I made when starting out with my dob was I went to hard too quickly, I burnt myself out by going out every night almost, plan ahead watch the moon phases and hope like heck that on the dark nights there are no clouds about, generally you get lucky, the other side of astronomy I like is the DIU aspect, there are things to busy yourself with while its sunny or cloudy.
Also try and hookup with someone who knows a lot more than you do, and as I am about to try in November, go to a star party.
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