Be careful how you choose your race at the start. Skill training is a pain in the ass in EVE, and many skills can take days or weeks, just to train one level ( Each skill has 5 levels )
Each race has certain attributes that affect how quickly skills take to learn. You have 2 neural remaps available at the game start, which allow you to rebalance your attribute levels, but you can only remap every 12 months!!! The attributes are as follows :
Intelligence
Memory
Charisma
Perception
Willpower
Different skills are dependant on different attributes ( Click "info" on a skill book to find out which ones ). This means that if your character has high Memory and Intelligence attribute levels (which will mean that your other attribute levels will be low) , then skills that are affected by those two attributes will train quickly, but skills affected by other attributes will train slowly. ( Having said that, all skills trained during your first 1.6 million skill points, will train at double speed )
There is an easy way to seriously speed up your training. Create a character with very high Intelligence and memory to start with. Then buy the following training skill books:
Instant Recall
Analytical Mind
Learning
Spatial Awareness
Iron Will
Empathy
Train them all in the order above to at least level 4, but preferably level 5. This will take along time to do, but will more or less half the training time for any other skills you learn, so it doesn't take very long to pay off ;) ( There's also advanced learning skills but don't worry about them at the beginning )
To help decide on the race of your starting character, download EveHq :
http://www.evehq.net/downloads.html
It has a character creatiion tool, which will calculate the best race for your needs ( plus evehq does loads of other really useful things ;) )
Eve is very daunting when you start because there's so much to learn, but its very addictive if your into that type of game. Just take one step at a time, and slowly build yourself up by doing the missions. Have fun! :D