I mentioned my stones earlier, but... as someone who only started sharpening recently:
1. Hit YouTube and watch some videos there. There are a bunch of good ones. Just remember that nobody is "right." There are a ton of different ways to skin this cat. Which is a strange analogy, and now an unneeded digression. Watch a few different ones - Jon Broida is good and an active member of this community, other good ones are Korin, Sharp, Carter, Kramer, etc. All of them have forgotten more about sharpening than you'll probably ever learn.
2. For added confidence, go ahead and test out your new, inexistant skills on something not all that important to you. I'll mention this again below: except in crazy rare cases, it's almost impossible to do permanent, irreversible harm to your knives, but you also probably don't want to start off on a 500 dollar blade - the fear factor alone will probably stunt your learning. I had a few 17 year old mid-quality knives around, the chef's was in good shape as it goes, but a utulity and paring were pretty rough. I also spent 3 euros at the extreme discount store down the street from me on an piece of stamped absolute garbage. I did the paring, the utility (both of which had chips and other deformations) first, dulled the 3 euro special on a rock and did that one. Results were... eh? But it gave me the confidence to attack my acceptable-conditioned chef's and bring it back to better than new. Yeah, they are all scuffed up thanks to horrible technique, but I learned what works for me and what doesn't, really. And I now have a 17 year old, soft steel Mundial chef's knife that shaves hair, slices paper and horizontally push-cuts micro-thin wafers of tomato, just like a real YouTube star.
3. Once you are there, go ahead and take a whack at something lovely. I have a beautiful Moritaki AS Nakiri. I love the form, I haven't had any issue with the Ku finish, the knife and I were made for one another. It was very sharp out of the box, but the edge was significantly dulled after just two hour-long prep sessions. It went from "show off video to a friend" sharp to "can't cleanly slice a tomato." I used my still-learning skills on the 3k (I didn't have the 6k yet) to refine the edge a bit, stropped it, and it was back to razor sharp. I didn't damage the finish, and felt pretty confident. I also didn't significantly change the stock edge. Well, a bit later, after several more hard core prep sessions, it was feeling again a bit dull - not bad per se, but no badass razor either. Basically, I questioned the OOB edge geometry. I examined it as closely as I could, and came up with my plan of action. 10 minutes later, after a new edge, deburr and polish on the 1k, then a lengthy polish on the 6k, then stropping with very fine compound, and it's effortlessly shaving hair and what not. I'm still learning, and it's an amazing feeling to make incremental progress on beautiful tools, making them fit your needs. As I mentioned above, it's almost impossible that you outright destroy your knife doing this. You might wear it a bit more, you might have to sharpen it twice or three times if you make a mistake, but you won't ruin it unless you TRY to ruin it.
That's my two cents, and they may well not be worth even that much.
