This can be a complicated topic for a Newbie. I'm not going to get into too much detail because I believe you don't care. You probably just want to learn how to mine, quickly!

You have to know a few things.

1. There are miners for CPU and GPU. Only more modern GPU's will work well. I will show you one of each
2. There are many, many currencies you can mine. The CPU miner can mine multiple currencies. The GPU miner mines Monero (XMR) only and Nvidia cards only. XMR is the most profitable coin to mine as of this writing and I am using Amazon AWS p2.xlarge instance which uses the Nvidia Tesla K80
3. As a newbie, it's easiest to start with a pool before you learn how to mine solo. I will show you minergate.com
4. There is an assumption you have linux experience. Both of these miners are setup using command line tools like ssh.

Be Aware! You must change the scripts below to use your own username for the pool you decide to register with. If you use my scripts out of the box, you will be mining for me. To that point, you should also be aware that in some cases, there is a built in donation to the mining operation beyond what your pool is charging you. That is to say, you will mine on behalf of the developer, maybe even up to 5%. This percentage can sometimes be changed.

I have made it quite easy for you to deploy a miner but you should be alert to what you are doing. I promise, you will LOSE MONEY in most circumstances. Consider electricity costs as well as the demand on your CPU/GPU. They will fail over time!

Investigate the alternatives, I like Genesis https://www.genesis-mining.com/ and the eco friendly Hydrominer https://www.hydrominer.org/

Let's start with the CPU version called cpuminer-multi.

Simply create the following bash script. You'll have to manually type it... chmod +x, and run it.

Project repository: https://github.com/tpruvot/cpuminer-multi.

Your miner will start automatically and look something like this.

############## END of CPUminer ################

This is the GPU miner called XMRig
Project repository: https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig-nvidia.git

This time you are going to need to run 2 scripts because we require a reboot after installing the Nvidia Cuda drivers.

Script-part-1

Script-part-2

This miner will also start automatically after the script executes and look something like this

It's worth mentioning, The GPUminer is about 4 times as efficient as the CPU miner.

Finally, here is a screenshot running multiple miners... (one of them at over 2.8 kH/s) along with the Minergate pool.