The 18-55 is kinda ok to start with. Its just a straight forward achromate with the attendant issues. Not the best by a long shot but fun to start with.
If you can afford it, get a 50mm f/1.8 lens. They're about $170. Still an achro but much better than the zoom.
IMHO the hardest part of the process is the focusing. It takes time to focus, snap an image, check the focus, refocus, snap another image etc, etc. It's was enough to get me pulling your hair out. Fortunately I have plenty. Then I came across DSLR Focus. What a Godsend for my astigmatic eyes. Bit of a learning curve with it, but $45 US really well spent. It still takes time to focus, so that doesn't change, but the refocus results appear on your laptop in about 4 sec with various graphs and figures telling you when your at closest to focus. You don't have to touch anything on the camera except the focus ring.
Also the zoom collar and focus ring are a bit easy to move, so I would sticky tape the zoom colar to the camera body and put a bit of blu-tack against the zoom collar and the focus ring. When I was using it I would always use the lens fully zoomed in or out as the zoom collar would move at times when focusing, hence the sticky tape. With the tape helping to hold the collar (I'd also hold it by hand against its stop when focusing) the blue-tac would give enough resistance to moving the focus ring to make fairly fine adjustments possible. Without it I found I was moving the focus too far all the time. Probably just my thick old fingers not being sensitive enough, but it works for me.
JM2CW