What kind of student are you? As in, are you more of a bookish type or adept at using your intuition? The two are not mutually exclusive of course, personally I'm wanting to be good at using them both in tandem, but when I started out I read a lot of blogs that said go with your intuition and toss out your books. After I while I realised mine wasn't all that good so I thought I'd be happier with reading books and all that stuff. Turns out I was
I believe it is important to develop your own relationship with the cards, personal meaning and all that, but I really needed my books at first to kind of get going at that. People are different and even if books was the way for me I know there are a lot of people who aren't into that at all, so that could be something to look into as well.
RWS is a very common deck for a lot of books to refer to, it might also be the most common of the big 3 styles today (RWS, Thoth, Marseille), so if you want to read a bunch of books it might be a good idea to get a RWS deck. There are of course several editions of it and a lot of highly inspired clones, so it's up to you which one you like the most. I think the centennial edition is lovely as the regular deck in the yellow box is too bright for my liking, but I have the Original RWS which is another muted edition. There are also redrawings of the classic cards such as the Universal or Radiant. If you're interested in the deck aeclectic has a page for them:
http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/cards/rider-waite-clone.shtml Some of these might be out of print and can be expensive, but anyone of those I mentioned by name are still in print and not that expensive these days.