Update- Well, I've been humming and hawing about recurve vs compound. I've heard good things about Ben Pearson bows so I went ahead and purchased this one off of Ebay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...e=STRK:MEWA:IT

I got some good comments about it from a couple of people and to get started I figured the price is right .