Water

Good day party peoples of the Zulu Nation.

I've pulled this off the forum, and there are a few comments and additional info in the SARC forum at SILO, but the first thing to know about prepping is water. You can have all the bullets, food, gadgets and skills in the world, but if you don't have water, you'll be dead in a few days. Fact. So, if you're new to preparedness, water is first. Get some water now to have it, and then follow up with learning a few different ways to purify it. First and most important skill. Put it this way, if water shuts down, how do you get clean water for drinking?

Here's two cheap and reasonable ways to start. If nothing else, you can print out the directions for the slow sand filtering system so you have it if there is no more interwebs... stupid solar flares.

If you fail to get your hands on anything and find yourself facing a situation where you need to get fresh water, first and foremost: boil. Remember boil orders? Boiling water destroys most no-no's in water. If you happen to get your hands on a plastic bottle, you can use the sun to kill stuff in the water by painting half the bottle black and leaving the clear side facing the sun for several hours. However, BPH related cancer becomes an issue if you keep doing it over and over and expose yourself to it constantly. But if you find yourself in a bind... water now... possibility of cancer later... it's your call.

Berkey products are really good and are at a really good price. Zombie Squad (great forum if you've never been) used them at Zombiecon (the Berkey Light version) to clean stream/river water when I went. A little drop of bleach in the top half kills the bacteria and parasites, the filters cleans everything (including the bleach) out. Although, I'm not entirely sure the bleach was even needed, but better to be safe than peeing out of your butt hole. Water tasted good... course that could've just been the ridiculous heat too.
http://www.berkeyfilters.com/

And then there's the sports bottle version.

Understandably, you may not have access to bleach later... although it's not entirely necessary, just an extra security step... but if you're neurotic like me, then redundancy of systems is a good thing. With that in mind you could combine the Berkey with a slow sand system. You can use either by themselves, but it can't hurt to double up either. Or, if you're just into building your own. This link has a couple downloadable PDFs available.
http://surferswithoutborders.org/Slow_Sand_Filter.html

So, first things first. Get some water now and start researching water filtering systems, bottles and and other methods of getting water. We'll circle back to this topic later when we get to harvesting rainwater and such... but that's not even worth thinking about if you're just now starting out. Baby steps.