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As I'm a relative beginner, I can only tell you my suggestion.  I started with acid formed cheeses and then simple semi-hard cheeses.  The first 5 or s10 cheeses I did were cheeses that didn't need a lot of weight on them (in fact a couple didn't need a press at all).  If you look at my Tomme thread https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,17583.0.html you can see what I did.  I'm currently using a small picnic cooler with frozen water bottles to keep it cold as a "cave".  You have to be on top of it, but it works completely fine and cost me the equivalent of about $15 (plus a few dollars for the "maturation boxes").  The caciotta I did (https://cheeseforum.org/forum/index.php/topic,17667.msg135434.html#new) was super fun, though it requires a way to keep your cheese warm (I have a 15 litre pot I definitely never used for making beer back before I realised that beer making was illegal in Japan in which I suspended a 5 litre pot in which I had a mould in which the cheese was kept at a nice temp -- The same setup worked very well for cheddaring my current Caerffili).

I think my biggest advice, though, is to start out with something fresh.  I ate Tomme #1 the day after I made it and to be completely honest, it's probably the cheese I enjoyed eating the most so far.  There is no need to make something designed to be eaten fresh.  You can practice doing makes for your cheeses and just eat them right away -- they are still good!  I made a couple of cheeses with my Dad at Christmas where we didn't even have a recipe.  We just made "cheese" and it was good.

Personally, I'm holding off on the pasta filata cheeses.  However, when I was in the UK (back in October and again in May), I became enamoured with Romanian Cascaval cheese (which is very similar to Italian Caciocavello -- https://cheesemaking.com/collections/recipes/products/caciocavallo-recipe -- except that it is aged differently) so I'm definitely going to be making something similar soon.  Mozzarella is tempting, but I would personally avoid "quick mozzarella" as milk where I am is too expensive to make mediocre cheese.  And traditional Fiore di latte (cow's milk mozzarella) looks like it's going to take a fair amount of time -- so spending a whole day making cheese and then putting it on pizza...  Hmmm...  I'm just not sure about it.  I'll have to try it at least once, anyway.  Strangely mozzarella is one of the few cheeses I can buy in Japan at a reasonable price (pecorino Romano and parmesan  being the other too -- expensive, but reasonably so).

Some other cheeses that are definitely on my list are feta style and haloumi.   I've done cheese curds once, but would like to do it again because I didn't do particularly well.  Super high on my list is also Crescenza/Stracchino https://cheesemaking.com/collections/recipes/products/crescenza-recipe.  Gavin Webber has said that he's doing a video of this style imminently, so I may wait until he puts it up to see what he's doing, but I think the make is similar enough to the caciotta that I won't have problems with it.  Anyway, all of these cheese are designed to be eaten fresh so I think they are good for getting started.

Thanks. I've also had a read through your Mistem cheese.

When I started making bread, I saw Flour Water Salt Yeast by Ken Forkish was one of two books most commonly recommended. It gave beginners insight into ingredients, a bit of history, recipes, & a way to tailor the recipes to their situation. Is there a similar book for cheesemaking?

Yes! Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking by Gianaclis Caldwell. Highly recommended.

Thanks.  Are there enough beginner & intermediate cheeses in here to make it worth my while, or does it get heavy into the advanced stuff?

Hi SlowRain, and welcome to the forum!  I first started out with Rikki Carroll's book called "Home Cheesemaking" and find it's a great beginner's book.  It also has a lot of fresh cheese recipes, that are easy to understand and follow for people new to cheesemaking. 

Very soon however I started having more questions than that book would answer (although it did answer a very many questions!) and was pointed to the book that Andy recommends.  It is really great, and I do think a beginner would be OK with it, but I am glad I started out as I did.  It has answered about 90% of my questions thus far (the rest have been answered by members of this forum!) and has really increased my understanding and improved my cheesemaking experiences.  And yes, there are recipes suited for beginner and intermediate level cheesemakers.

So I think you would do very well with either book, or both...but if I had to recommend just one book, it would be "Mastering Artisan Cheesemaking" because it is overall more comprehensive in content.

I've never read Ricki Carroll's book, but I *often* read recipes from cheesemaking.com (which is Ricki Carroll's shop).  They have a ton of recipes and all of them are quite good (although sometimes a bit hard to figure out).  If you are interested to know the *why* of what you are doing and not just follow a recipe, then I think Caldwell's book is the way to go.  You can easily supplement with other recipes.  But if you are worried that you might be overwhelmed by technical information, then you might start with Carroll's book (which has been highly recommended to me by many, many people).  I actually think Caldwell's book isn't actually technical enough for me, but I'm a bit of a strange case ;-)

Mike, I wasn't going to say anything, but now that you mention it ...

A key difference between Caldwell and many others is that often books will try to give a large number of recipes - 200 Easy Cheeses is one such book, and the title illustrates the point. What frustrated me very early on, with such books, is that I couldn't understand what made the difference between cheese # 48 and cheese # 132; all I could do was blindly follow the recipe.

With Caldwell's book, you get some technical information, but it is not in an overly technical form, if that makes sense - it is explained in terms that do not assume you remember any of your high school biology, but yet without being simplistic or patronizing. (At least, that was my experience in reading it.)

Meanwhile, you get a smaller set of recipes, but those recipes illustrate the key different types of cheese, and she does provide a few variations to see how that basic type can be made in different ways. You can certainly simply follow her recipes (and I often do), but you can also start with her recipe and make your own variations (and I often do that, too).

Thanks, everyone.  You've given me a good direction to go.