Harvey
When I started off a couple of years ago I bought Elements 6 from Ebay and The Photoshop Elements 6 Book For Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski as the software doesn't come with a hard copy user manual. I find that using a book which I can read through helps me to understand what the software can do and having it available means that I have the instructions to hand to follow at my own pace. However, looking on Ebay today there didn't seem to be many copies of earlier versions and copies of Elements 9 were around the same price or higher than it can be bought for from such as Amazon (£58.92). Last year I upgraded to Elements 9, again with a book (Photoshop Elements 9: The Missing Manual by Barbara Brundage. In many ways this route helped me to grasp the basics before moving on but buying a book or using some online tutorials might have meant that I could have gone straight for the then current version and still coped. For what it's worth my advice would be to go for Elements 9 and a good book as the bulk of what you are likely to want/need to do is the same, or near enough, whatever the version and you can take your time learning how to use the bells & whistles as and when you find you need them.
