I place a lot of casual bets on cricket, footy, soccer and occasionally boxing, with varied success. I'm not a committed punter like some but I do enjoy it and would like to take it up more seriously.

I've never previously taken any sort of interest in horse racing at all and have such little grounding in basic terminology and the variables of the sport that most of the posts on this forum are undecipherable to me.

I've decided to spend a few months reading heavily in order to lay the foundations so I can eventually become the sort of punter who can expect to turn a healthy profit by the end of a year of punting.

I bought a couple of horse racing weeklies today and, as expected, had a pretty hard time following the articles but have started highlighting words and looking them up on the net for definitions.

What I intend to do is first read a book outlining the very basics of horse racing, from terminology to tactics to variables such as track bias. Having done that I'd like to get a couple of the seminal books on betting systems and tricks that punter's can use to pick a winner with some degree of reliability.

I also intend to read forums like this and continue to read papers and magazines to learn the names of horses, trainers, jockeys and stables.

Basically I'm trying to build a knowledge base from what is currently an almost non-existant grounding in horse racing.

I'd greatly appreciate it if you folks could help me out and give me some authors and titles that will serve purposes I described above.

Cheers