Mods/Thaumcraft/Getting Started

Early Game
A Thaumcraft game starts off as a mostly ordinary Minecraft game, in that you need to accumulate various resources before you can start playing with magic. So, gather your tools and resources as usual, building farms and mining ores. Thaumcraft adds a few special wrinkles:
 * ../Node/s -- If you happen to spot one, don't mess with it until you get the Thaumometer, but you can mark them for later.
 * Three magical biomes: Magical Forest is valuable, especially the silverwood trees.  Eerie biomes and ../Taint/ed land are hazardous, and you should avoid making lairs near them.
 * New ores. Amber and Cinnabar need iron picks, and aren't useful until later.  Stockpile them.
 * Aspect-Infused Stone -- Unlike regular ores, these glow in the dark, and are visible at great distances. They drop shards of Aspect crystal, which you need to collect.  They come in six flavors, for the six Primal ../Aspect/s -- while all six types can be found in any biome, each aspect is much more common in some biomes than others.  You need at least one shard of each type to build your first Thaumometer, and you'll want a backup.  To complete your research equipment, you'll eventually need 9 or 10 of each.  (That's for a crystal cluster of each type, one mixed cluster, and three more Thaumometers as part of other equipment.)
 * New mobs with new drops (again, save the drops for later):
 * Angry Zombies: Slightly tougher zombie that appears in magical biomes, and drops brains as well as the usual.  They get bigger as they lose health.
 * Wisps: Flying orbs of light.  Some of them will zap you with lightning -- just run out of range, they're not big on following you.  If killed, they drop ethereal essence, which is valuable for more advanced magics.
 * Pech: These duck-people can be traded with.  They value anything made of gold (such as golden armor from mob drops), and certain magical things such as mana beans.  You need to throw them a few freebies before they become willing to trade with you (green sparkles), but then you can right-click them to open an interface, where you will offer similar items in exchange for a semi-random grab bag of items.  Pech will run to pick up any loose items, this can be used to lead them into captivity.  Special tip: they can despawn only when their inventories are empty -- their trade goods don't count, but any non-precious items they've picked up, do.  When they start trading back the trash they picked up while you were trapping them, top them off with more junk, especially stuff that doesn't stack.
 * Ink and Paper -- stockpile them. Wreak havoc among the squids!

Create your first wand and Thaumonomicon as soon as you have the necessaries. Read everything you can from the Thaumonomicon, and keep the wand in your hotbar. Even without nodes, the wand will collect small amounts of vis from mobs you kill, which will come in handy later.

Once you've got all the crystal types (and some gold), make your Thaumometer, a research table, and an arcane crafting table as below, and start researching. Make and carry an extra set of scribing tools, and some paper -- you will occasionally get research notes as you scan stuff. Start scanning everything in sight. Go through your chests for more items to scan, and make and scan samples of all the ordinary crafted items you can. Remember that you can't read many items until you've discovered the necessary aspects. As you research devices, make samples of anything you can, and scan those.

If you haven't already, get your first few diamonds, attend to setting up your enchanting table, and grab some extra obsidian, because you will eventually need Nether materials. As soon as you've got the materials and research, upgrade to a gold-capped greatwood wand.

Creating your wand
First you need some iron caps, those are made by placing iron nuggets in a shape of a helmet onto a crafting bench. You need 2 caps. Then you need a stick. Combine your stick and caps in a diagonal shape with the stick in the middle, and there you have your Iron Capped Wooden Wand.

Thaumonomicon
Get your wand and a bookself. Hit the bookshelf with a wand and a Thaumonomicon will appear. Pick it up and you have your in game "wiki" on your hands.

Researching
You need to read the Thaumonomicon entry for this. To get started on researching, first you need a ../Thaumometer/, and a research table. You can make a research table by placing two ../Table/s next to each other, and clicking them with ../Scribing Tools/. While you're at it, make a third table and zap it with your wand, to make an ../Arcane Crafting Table/. (That will let you create the next round of magical devices.) Finally, make an extra set of scribing tools to carry with you, and some paper. Carry some of the paper, load up the research table with the rest. (While scanning stuff, you will occasionally get flashes of inspiration for new research, and it helps to have something to write them down with.)

At first, you won't be able to scan everything because you don't know the aspects for them, but this will change rapidly. In particular, you'll need to make Victus at the research table (as detailed in the Thaumonomicon) before you can scan almost anything alive (or dead, or undead for that matter), but once that's done, your learning should be pretty straightforward.

Then go around the world scanning all sorts of things. As you build up research points, you can start researching recipes for new things to build (which you can then also scan), and some magical buffs.