The Friend is a good place to buy when you know what you want, JB. Their prices always seem to be pretty competitive, and their selection is pretty good.
The Live isn’t a bad choice at all. Some will disagree, but for someone just starting out, Creative makes a decent card with very nice SF capabilitites. You may find you’ll get into soundfonts and midi sooner than you think.
Did you decide whether or not you needed multi-channel?
As for mixers, you can buy very cheap to get started. Behringer is well known for making decent stuff for way cheap. One upgrade to consider before laying down money is a mixer with Inserts (or Direct Outs). Using Inserts allows you to use the mixer for both input to the sound card and for monitoring new and existing tracks out of N.
The whole monitoring issue will real its ugly head soon enuf, and you’ll have questions, i’m sure. Buying a mixer with Inserts will provide you an inexpensive solution (altho’ there are others) that many folks here use.
teej