I would strongly encourage running AT LEAST one 14-day trial before actually paying anything, and use an alternate email address for it (for reasons I'll go into detail later).
It's not a game for everybody, mistakes are costly and easy to make, especially early on.
You might want to start reading this first:
http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=774785 DO
Also, visit the "Industrial Sized Knowledgebase" link at the very start inside there... it's basically a player-created game manual.
It's big, but looks quite nice and is full of mostly useful stuff.
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If you haven't paid anything yet, there's a relatively easy way to get up to 51 days free with no strings attached if some player trusts you enough to not scam him :)
Sending out a "buddy" invite enables you to create a 21-day trial instead of a 14-day trial, then the other player can send you either a PLEX item (apply to get +30 days subscription and insta-promotion out of trial account status) or the in-game money to buy one.
The player that sent you the invite gets a bonus +30 days for himself, so he loses nothing. There's a limit of 3 invites per month any player can send out, and he can only ever send one to any specific email address.
Risk being, you just take the PLEX/money and run, that's why I said he needs to trust you to some degree.
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Personally, I'd say give it a whirl with the regular 14-day trial, and don't worry about making any mistakes, start off with the idea that you will not be playing that character after the first 14 days are over.
You can't use the same email address for a new trial (nor a "buddy invite"), so using an alternate (less frequently used, or created specifically for this) email address would be best.
If you really do end up not making any big mistakes and enjoy it so much that you feel like you don't want to start over with a new character (HIGHLY unlikely, everybody makes huge mistakes early on), you can always keep playing even if you started out thinking you wouldn't.
Me ?
I played 7 trial accounts before I activated my first one.
:)
Granted, my problems were mostly of a "no RL time available" kind for most of those dry runs, but still.
