Re: beginners guide - please help me?

Welcome to the world of geocoding. ;) The first tutorial I hit
suggested I go to the census website and download the entire TIGER/line
data files (5 Gigs), dump them into a database, and then write my own
specialized methods (or as the tutorial said, "simple ratio maths"
(sic) to calculate the exact lat/long for a particular address.

Search the group for geocoding, there are several services out there. I
am currently using
http://developer.yahoo.net/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html, but others here I
hear use other services such as geocoder.us, or simply violate the
Google TOS and scrape lat/long values from google. :(