I like playing online as I can do other things at the same time and kill time when I am bored. I would highly recommend PokerTracker to start tracking your hands as you can learn a lot from the information it tells you about how you play and where you leaks are. But you need A LOT of hands before you can do this. IE I'm at ~60K cash game hands. With this many hands you can start to get a picture of how you play. With that said am playing to improve my game and the only way is with more hands and getting put in more situations. This is why I started at 1c/2c people might laugh at these $2 buyins for 100BB but it's a cheap class. I have to use a certain service to get cash there from Canada but it is easy to sign up for or you can go to the post office and buy money grams to use on the site at no extra cost.
For me I use the following graph to decide when to move up and when to move down
[ATTACH=CONFIG]2807[/ATTACH] Start with $100 and it gives you 50 bullets at the 2NL stakes and you DO NOT move up till you are at $250. etc.. it's a math equation that you can keep applying as you go up.
I have my display set to BB values not cash as I play based on BB numbers and that way when I move up or down levels it's all the same thing.
Ask away if you need any help getting it all going!
