You can either read a book about Tarot or look it up online. Tarot Plain and Simple is a book Maxine recommended to learn Tarot(don't quote me on that). I read this book and I liked it. But you shouldn't rely too much on the meanings from books. You want to learn the general meaning behind each card so you know what's it about, and then listen to what your intuition tells you.
It helps to have a deck that's based off of rider-waite-smith
system because images on the cards have something to do with the cards meaning, some decks have pretty weird images that make no sense as to what the cards meaning is.
Cards above are the same(7 of Swords). Which of these gives you more insight as to what the card actually means?
So make sure to use a good deck which will help you remember the meaning of the cards better. Later on you can use whatever deck you want. Avoid decks that have hebrew letters in them because they will hurt you and you will get massive headaches from them because you will connect to those vile energies. Raider Waite deck is one of these.
I'd personally recommend you Witches Tarot deck, it has nice images and no hebrew crap. I use Robin Wood deck, which is also the deck that's used in the book I mentioned above. A very simple layout is 3 cards(past, present, future), 5 card layout, etc. Celtic Cross layout gives you a lot of information but it takes a while to learn how to read it properly and gain the most out of it. Just google for tarot layouts and you will find what you're looking for.