Best thing to do is buy a bag of resistors for about £1 and practice soldering them into some breadboard. This will give you some hands on experience.

Then I'd suggest building a super simple passive preamp. Ie, pot in a box. It'll give you a chance to drill the chassis to fits the rca sockets, solder wires to the sockets and then solder a pot to a tiny pcb and once you've done, if it works, you've made something.

An Alps blue, alps blue pcb, chassis and some super cheap wire and 4 rcas can all be had for under £30 and you have a spare emergency preamp when done.

I'll post some links to the bits and then you can have a look.

The BigBottle is a solder by numbers affair so as long as you learn to solder, can follow a simple plan and pay close attention to the details, you will have a working unit. If it goes wrong, it can be put right.

The LDA kit Chris does isn't for beginners I'm afraid. I've seen the ones Alan assembled and if a seasoned 40 year electronics Pro like Alan had to ask for clarification on some instructions , then it's definitely not one I'd take on at the minute. One for the future possibly.

I meant it when I offered help. I'll help with the learning process, just as I was helped when I started out. I know very little about electronics in comparison to the guys here but that's why the BigBottle phonostage project was created. For beginners to build a phonostage that keeps up with the best of them for very little outlay. £350 costs for a hybrid valve phonostage is pennies and the performance, well, I'll let those who build one decide.