You don't say if you've ever spent time camping or hiking before. The more you have camped and hiked in the past, the easier your transition to backpacking will be, because these activities have a large overlap with backpacking. If you are a complete newcomer to camping and hiking, this will require you to ramp up to backpacking rather more slowly.

You can pick up a lot of information by browsing extensively in the back pages of the Backcountry Beginners forum here. Backpacking is not an especially dangerous activity, but its dangers are almost all related to inexperience and at their extreme boundaries they are potentially fatal, so getting information about how to gain experience safely - and following it - are quite important to your learning how to backpack.