I know you're just getting started but be warned that good rigging can get pretty complicated. What I mean is that it's not just a matter of building a skeleton with some IK solvers. You have to decide what you want your model to do. Personally, I don't just build one rig for a model. I end up with 2 or 3. Each one has a specific purpose. It's possible to build a super rig that can do everything but it can become so complicated that trying to trouble shoot the thing when it doesn't work right will drive you mad. I build my control rig seperate from the skeleton that the model is bound to. In other words. I have 1 copy of the skeleton that is only used to control the model via skin weights. That's all it does. It isn't designed to make the model move. The control rig is a second copy of the skeleton that has all the IK handles, set driven keys (SDK), expressions, etc.. built onto it. It also has a low res copy of the model attached to it so that you can animate and preview your animation in real time. The full res model probably won't move in real time since it has a lot more vertices that need to be calculated....

Anyway, the idea is this; you do your animation with the control rig and the low res model then, when you're happy with it, you connect the control rig to the bound rig (the skeleton with the high res model attached to it). Now you can set up your lights and render. This kind of a set up takes a little extra work but it pays for itself when things start going wrong and you need to work on the rig. Sorry but I left out a lot of little steps for connecting the control rig to the bound rig. I use a half dozen MEL scripts that I paid for to be able to do this kind of a thing. It was money well spent.

IF you want to see a model of mine that uses a control rig and a bound rig then go to my site and check out my alien model..