In order to get started, we need some text to analyse. There are now many sources of online texts that can be used. However remember that just because text is on the web, does not mean that is freely re-usable for whatever purposes we have; the issues of copyright and ownership of electronically distributed documents are complicated. One substantial source of "freely available" texts is the Gutenberg Project. We will take some texts from here to begin with. Its home page is here.
Go to this site and download (at least) the following two texts:
To do this, you should log in on some computer and create a folder for your 'downloaded' texts.
When you have downloaded the files, you will see that they are probably zipped, i.e., compressed so that they do not take so long to download. Click on them to unzip them, i.e., to extract their contents. This should leave you with two text files (recognizable by the extension ".txt").
Note: if you have problems connecting to the Gutenberg project site (sites can always be unavailable for a while for maintainance, or be moved), the two example texts are available in zipped form here and here.
Another source of texts is the Online Book Initiative.