I do everything I can do. If I lack tools, then I try and find a friend who has them and then I do the work. I learnt most of my stuff with my father. He was a mecanic, so I got to learn a bit from him. But the best way is just to try yourself out. Try and get the service manual for your car, and look through it. Of course there some mods that you might want to leave to more experienced people. But most bolt-ons you can do yourself, if your talking about mods.
The best method I found of learning, is by getting yourself a crapbox as a first car, and fixing it up. Or helping out someone who already knows what they are doing. Good places to start off with to learn is doing the general maintenance on the car. Changing fluids (oil, coolant...) changing spark plugs, various filters, those kinda things. Just to get an introduction to getting your hands dirty. From there you can move on to changing brake pads, changing radiators, alternators, waterpumps... a little bit harder things. Then you can go on to changing timing belts, opening up the engine and other things.
Of course it helps if you've got a decent set of tools. I would recommend you check out the canadian tire specials. They've often got good deals on kits. I would recommend you get a good set of wrenchs and boxs, sae and metric keys (hex allen, torxs, all those), screwdrivers, torquewrench, hammer (plastic and metal) With that you can pretty much do just about any job.
Hope this helps you out!
