Silent Hunter 5. A n00bie lookin' for a good Sim.

So I have never played or even new about any kind of submarine simulator, until a few days ago.
 
My friend told me he is a big follower of the Silent Hunter series and pre-ordered SH5 yesterday.
 
I have never played any of the series but I know how Sims are often structured and are generally plagued by steep learning curves.
I am however, willing to give it a shot and play a good amount of games with my friend and his friends.
 
Is there any tips for new comers? Anything I should know?
 
P.S, footage from the game looks pretty damn badass.

There's a few things you should know:
 
1. You may need to spend hundreds of dollars on peripherals to play these games. (My Joystick and throttle cost about $350, still yet to get any TrackIR, paddles or other things.)
 
2. Simulators are realistic (durr), don't expect any Call of Duty kiddie bullshit here.
 
3. You need a good PC to run these games (Most sims are very system heavy.)

4. There will most likely be alot of bugs, and I mean alot.  
 
5. You need alot of time to play these. Don't expect to hop on, play for around 10 minutes then quit. It may takes hours to finish a simple game of Deathmatch.
 
When you get the game one of the first things you should so is look up a guide, read through all the controls and fiddle around with them until you're comfortable.
 
What other types of sims are you looking at? Just Silent Hunter 5 or others? If you're looking for a good flight sim I'd suggest Lock On or DCS: BlackShark, for a military sim check out ArmA 2.

What Fudgeblood said. I have a Silent Hunter game and these are the reasons I never play it.

Well on on a lighter note. The Silent Hunter (I wrote silent hill for some reason) series has a very good difficulty system where you customise the difficulty as you see fit and that gives you a difficulty percentage with 100% being the most. So for instance you can turn off limited fuel, you can turn off external views etc. This means you can slowly up the difficulty as you play.  Some people play that game using graph paper calculator, geometry set and do the torpedo trajectories in real time! Another cool thing is that its semi open world where the enemy does exist, and trading lanes, and patrols are simulated, so if you're into that thing that'll be a bonus.
 
Another bonus is that the Silent Hunter community is amazing. They develop a lot of cool mods and often create gameplay guides/videos and give advice to newbies. 
 
The creators are quite good to the community too, they take on board advice quite often, its very close knit compared to many other games. However I would expect some bugs upon launch, however they end up patching most of the problems. So, i'd say give it a go, its a beautiful looking series and if you put some time into it, you'll get a lot in return. Theres nothing like limping back to port full of water, on fire and half the hull missing just surviving an intense random battle. :D

I've played my fair share of Silent Hunter 3 and Fudgeblood is going way too over-the-top. You don't need peripherals in the least, if you don't want to. As Johnny5 mentioned, you can customize just about anything that could make the game inaccessible (well, except dying...). 
 If you're interested, I say give it a go at least. :)