I'd published my first home brewing book on Amazon/Kindle. I then sent a copy with the proper letter to the AHA publisher lady. She told me I brought nothing new to the table? No matter that I included history from the last 10,000 years or so!? All about the various styles of home brewing I'd done up to that point, original recipes I'd brewed, etc? The HB publishing bunch is one tough crowd. They want the all-new, latest, greatest brewing science. Personally, I think they have their sights set way too high, but that's my opinion. Thought I'd help you out, so here goes;
Leonard, Sheffield Village, OH
Started home brewing beer on the kitchen stove in 2010. Made wine for some 15 years until job & life took over about age 30.
I wanted to brew lagers like the ones common in the Cleveland area in the 50's to about 1965. They had way better flavor & color than the ones so commonplace these days.
I was brewing once or twice a month, until I got 4-5 batches bottled up. Then I'd cruise for awhile till I emptied another batch's worth of bottles.
My favorites cover a lot of territory, but here's a general list; IPA's, IIPA's, English bitters & Extra Special Bitters (ESB's), pale ales, German lagers, pilsners, European lagers & pilsners, craft beers in general. There are too many brands to list them all.
I like to brew these same styles to my own tastes. Besides rare or extinct beers I've built recipes for in Beersmith 2.2, like the extinct East German Kottbusser, The rare German Dampfbier, & I have the ingredients to brew the ancient German Gruit festival ale called Mumme'. It dates back to at least 1392! I also experiment with hybrid lagers, using the White Labs 029 kolsch yeast, which has a lager-like balance that helps a lot with getting those old school lager flavors down.
I basically brew anything from kit-n-kilo to partial mash, partial boil brew in a bag (PM/PB BIAB), & still use the same 5 gallon (20 QT) stainless steel kettle I started with, albeit on a newer, higher-powered stove. The 5 gallon kettle came from a nested set of 4 kettles, which come in handy for different size mashes & as a sparge water kettle. I use floating thermometers in the mash & sparge kettles, wrapping the mash tun in old coats to help maintain mash temp. I have a lot of odds-n-ends, like long handled plastic spoons & paddles, large dual-layer fine mesh strainers to aerate the chilled wort & get hop trub, etc removed while pouring into the fermenter. Fermenting buckets, bottling buckets, bottle trees, avinator for sanitizing the clean bottles right before filling, racking tubes, bottling wand & TUBE. just a lot of little tools that make the jobs quicker & easier that're too numerous to list. I've also done a one-galloon all grain brewing kit I was given by Homebrew Supply in order to write an article about it. That turned out to be only 9-12oz bottles, but wow, was that the best Robust Porter I ever drank! The one gallon kits are great for small apartment brewers with very limited space concerns. Also handy for experimental batches that can be upscaled later.
Get a good quality kettle(s) right from the start! And at least 5 gallons to start with, when/if you start with partial boil extract kits, those being the most common. Get a nylon 5 gallon paint strainer bag to fit it when you move up to partial mash brewing. That's the cheapest, easiest way to get into partial mash. We have our Australian home brewers to thank for coming up with that one! A bench capper is the best to use, rather than a wing capper to crimp the crown caps on the bottles. It can take any size & shape of bottle without the neck shape coming into play. & PBW, or Powdered Brewery Wash, & Starsan no-rinse sanitizer are the best, most commonly used cleaner & sanitizer out there, in my opinion. Save some one gallon plastic ice tea jugs to make & store them in. I also bought beer with " pop top" bottles to soak in PBW to remove the labels & glue to reuse for home brew. The sturdy boxes in 12 or 24-12oz bottles size are handy to store the empties, or condition filled bottles in & keep the light off them, so as not to " skunk" the beer. There are things like shelves & dunnage containers to store things in/on as well. They come in handy to organize things, which keeps the wife happy. Then there's bottle brushes, tubing brushes, bucket lid prying tools. etc. Lots of little things that help that you'll collect along the way as you learn the art of home brewing.
That's the short version I'll give you to start with. I'm sure others will chime in with there preferences, views, etc. It's been one heck of an experience, this addictive hobby of home brewing. I think it's more difficult than making wines, since the flavors in beer must be, shall we say, constructed from scratch. But that is the brewer's art that makes it so attractive. It is man's own history that tells us it is always easier to destroy than to create. To become closer to the creator, by attempting something similar on a far humbler scale. And by & large, the home brewing crowd are a great, fun-loving bunch of folks I've had the honor to meet occasionally. Or to get to know on sites like Home brew talk. We help each other with problems,. ideas, recipes, & all manner of things. After a time, it gets to be something of a second family. And you can't buy that!...
ipe: edit: OP edited his reply to Fatdragon to not sound as snotty, so the escalation post I made might not be as relevant as before his original post was made. 
