Oh, another thing....those pretty pictures in the book. That's not what you're going to see when you finally catch these objects. Jupiter will show some colour and cloud bands, Saturn will show some colour too and the rings (depending on their orientation to us). Mars is an orange-red dot most of the time (can see some surface details when it's close by). Neptune and Uranus are just bluish dots. Some stars will show colour, especially when they're binaries (colour contrasts), but unless you have a fairly large scope, forget about colour in anything else. Except a possible pale yellow-green in the bright nebulae, like M42, M8, Eta....your eyes just aren't sensitive enough or gather enough light to see the colour there, and when they do it's because they're seeing the green light, which your eyes are most sensitive to.
I'm afraid much of the universe looks pretty bland, but don't let that put you off looking
