Greetings and Welcome to OZformers!

One can never be too young or too late to start collecting, nor for that matter learning about Transformers so please feel free to ask any and all the question you need.

A good place to start to try to come to grips with the 80s era of Transformers or G1, would be at the TFwiki, it holds a wealth of information on just about every aspect of Transformers over it's 27+ year history - So I think you'll find that to be of great help.

Also, Target stores have recently started stocking a book called the Transformers Vault, of which contains a good starters guide to Transformers in general, you can find many thoughts and reviews of it by fellow OTCA members here.
The best way to learn about the 1986 movie era though, would be to find yourself a copy of the Madman released G1 series Box-set, which can be found at online stores, JB Hi-fi's, Kmarts and Big Ws.

I hope that this is of some help to you and if you've any further questions please do ask them, have a look around this forum too, you'll find a wealth of information located right here.