Help a chess noob

[DMBFan23]

Sup PoG,

So with all the chess threads here, I figured I'd do some googling and see what I could find. I've played chess before, never formally, and can beat all my friends who haven't played much chess but lose to anyone who has studied chess at all.

I searched around for a while and found FICS, got my ass handed to me a couple times, and googled some chess strategy and came up with about 100000 pages of stuff, which is a bit overwhelming.

Where should I go to start learning about chess? is there a good book that you would recommend for beginners? any opinion on the many online references? how did you learn?

Thanks in advance y'all