The most important thing you need to consider in my opinion, is first "what am I looking for". Data analysis is two things, working with data and getting insights from that data. For the first thing, you can find many books online, just youtube "data mining" "data analysis" and stuff like that. It's merely a technical issue, and it can be learned fast. For that, you can begin here http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/ if you want more than just excel. Second, is how to understand and interprete these results, this is more complex and yet easier. Begin by getting some dataset, clearly setting a goal and test it by running some algorithms or methods on this data. That's the basical workflow. Sometimes you'll happen to discover patterns, but you have to observe and be patient. And remember, without human insight, data is just a bunch of numbers.. Cheers mate