The book that got me into trading was "Trading for a living" by Dr. Elder. Very nice book, it was a book that changed the way I looked at things.
Mr. Tharp wrote a good article about all this, and you may want to check Stocks and Commodities magazine from 2001, there is a 3 piece article I wrote that may help explain some of the differences.
Since Don mentioned it I should give the link as DaytradersUSA asked if they could put it on the web. http://www.daytradersusa.com/tharp.html Rtharp
if you're a broker making decent $..start trading (swing or day) from your office if you can. If you work at a big wire house you can open an acct with no transaction fees and just pay yourself 1% on the assets. try that for a while, get some newbie guy to do your cold calling or whatever and if you like trading then leave to do it fulltime. the only problem is, if you're relatively new at your firm you might get some crap about trading your acct too much.