I'm trying to get a solid understanding of the protocol and will be reading the original bitcoin paper by Satoshi tomorrow, as well as diving into the wiki at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/.

What I'm interested in doing first is just cloning something like bitaddress.org just as a challenge to myself and to also get familiar with all the different aspects of bitcoin.
I'm most specifically interested in how mixing services work and how BlockChain's taint analysis works.

Thanks again wumpus, davout, and gweedo for the suggestions.  Really appreciate it!