Ah glad to see someone posted Newbie Tuesday #1. I watched that live back in the day. I was just starting then and that was incredibly useful. That dApollo guide someone posted is also very good.
The best thing you can do as an immediate beginner is to practice vs. the AI. Don't worry about beating it, just worry about spending your money and always building workers and supply buildings (depots, pylons, overlords). Playing multiplayer without having the basic fundamentals down is a waste of time. The AI is also a lot less stressful for most people to play against since it isn't another player. Basic fundamental skills like always building workers, not getting supply blocked and spending your money consistently will easily get you to platinum league, if not diamond. Only when you start playing against Master League or top Diamond do you actually have to worry about strategy because at that point macro becomes more consistent. Below that having better macro can usually beat most strategies outside of DT/cloak builds, but don't worry about those.
DO NOT GET CAUGHT UP IN CUTESY STRATEGY AND POSITIONING STUFF BEFORE YOU HAVE THE MECHANIC FUNDAMENTALS DOWN. Even in Diamond where I am I still see people trying to do cute little strategies while falling behind on macro. These strategies and ideas are not worth it. They do not help you improve in the long run. They may win you a few games now but it will not help you improve. I sees Zerg players with perfectly positioned overlords and zerglings to spot but they are down 10 workers because their production sucks so they lose anyway. Or Terrans and Protoss doing cutesy micro in battles but not macroing so when the battle is done they are massively behind and have a 2000 resource bank that should have been spent. If you go to Team Liquid and view the strategy section you will see people in Gold league asking what was wrong with their composition. The issue is never composition but macro. Macro can get you to Diamond. I have done it with all 3 races.
Also, losing is part of the game. Get used to it. It means you have things to improve. It kinda sucks but that is how it is. And do not blame others for your losses. Yes you will lose to cheese you did not scout in time once in a while but that is okay. You can learn way more from a loss than from a win.
EDIT:
As a result if you can get decent at setting up a variety of early game rushes you could probably do reasonably well; it's something like 5% of players that actually do anything aggressive beyond sending a token reaper, spider mine, or oracle prior to already having 2 bases (compared to 30% at WoL launch or so), except maybe in mirror matches?
This is a poor mentality that does not work once you reach the higher leagues and will just end with you getting stuck cheesing every game because you can't keep up in a macro game. The reason the people in those can pull off fast expand builds consistently is because they can defend these cheesy/gimmicky types of builds while still expanding. One base builds may work in the lower leagues but not in anything past Platinum where people actually start to scout. People learn how to respond when they see someone one-basing hard and as a result most one-base all-in builds fall apart versus someone that plays intelligently, and this leads to both players expanding because they know their one base build will likely fail against all but the most greedy of players. The only one base builds that still work with anything resembling consistency (and even then not too consistent against good players) are Terran 1/1/1 builds that start with aggressive drops to throw Protoss off before making a final push, and these are not builds that can be pulled off consistently at the lower leagues because all of the player's timings are already off. Outside of that there is very little that works. Sure you can 6pool a Protoss and maybe win a bit but that won't get you anywhere because the higher up you go the worse it is because people learn how to beat it and then you will be stuck with worse mechanics and you will lose a lot.
And there are a number of reasons you don't see one base builds anymore (there are certainly agressive builds still in the game today, but not how is being described here) compared to the launch of WoL. Firstly, the maps are significantly larger and much harder to all-in on now. On Steppes of War in WoL a 3rax stim all-in was powerful not because of the build itself, but because the map was so small that you could reach an opponent's base really fast so anything other than a one base response to it (say a 2 or 3 gateway robo build) would basically always lose. On modern maps you can hold a 3rax stim all-in with a 1gate expand build (in WoL), and now with the mothership core that is even more so a true statement in HOTS. With Zerg that is also the case, the maps are large enough that a zerg can scout the 1base build and respond appropriately in time. And with Terran too. If they see their opponent one-basing and they throw down extra bunkers and get into a defensive position where they will likely win. Expansion builds are so normal now that anything other than that immediately raises a red flag and puts people into a defensive mindset, which makes one base builds even worse.
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