I've talked with a few folks who were interested in getting started with tying their own flies. My advice to those wanting to get their feet wet in tying flies for warmwater species would be to start tying wooly bugger-type patterns.

These are easy to learn, easy to modify, and catch just about everything.

They can be as simple as marabou & chenille. Then you can learn to add the hackle. Then you can play with various weighting options like glass beads, brass beads, lead or copper wire, bead-chain or barbell eyes. As your skills progress, you can add flash to the marabou or dub the body instead of the chenille. Or a mylar tubing body.

It increases your confidence greatly, as a newbie, when you start catching fish on your creations. And these are easy to fish as well!

I fondly remember some of the extremely horrific flies I first tied up. I wasn't tying by any patterns, and hadn't learned the proper sequence for things. I think I got the marabou tail on correctly, and sort of mangled the chenille into place, and then realized I wanted to use silver wire for weight. I wrapped so much of that on the outside, you couldn't tell what color the chenille was! U-G-L-Y!! And yet I caught several bass, bluegills and crappies on it! As my flies progressively improved in quality, I was embarrassed to still have it in my fly box, so I "unwound" the whole thing in order to reuse the hook.