Good Book / Instructions on Home Recording

You don’t say if it’s for music or voice (like for podcasting or radio news type stuff).

For voice, I recommend a website and a book: 

http://transom.org/topics/tools/ (be sure to click on Shows and Techniques as well as Tools)

http://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reporting-Guide-Journalism-Production/dp/0226431789

If you want information for music recording, I recommend doing searches online for ”Setting up a home studio” or something like that.

A while back my daughter needed to record interviews for her thesis.  She had a laptop and I told her to use a free program called audacity and her microphones on the laptop then same the file as an mp3.  Then she used a service to convert the mp3 files to transcript.  Audacity is free and has a full featured recording studio with effects so you can take the audio and do many things with it.  I often use it to modify music files to take only parts I want, amplify, fade in and out, normalize, etc.  Anything that makes a sound on your computer can be recorded with audacity which also means that you will need to suppress all those beeps and such associated with computer operations.