This quick and dirty guide is the result of refining a few different comments of mine for people struggling in their first year. It's my first written guide for any game, and is designed to be quick cheat-sheet for people who are unhappy with their rate of progress. I hope I help some of you.
Training: Don't focus on one stat or a build or ratio. Train the highest gym stat multiplier all the way until you unlock George's gym. Take as much xanax per day as you can manage, also try to get as many 30 point refills as you can manage.
Fighting: Do not fight without getting paid a minimum of 1M per hit, period. Energy is for training or for getting paid. Do not waste money on enemies, gambling, bounties, etc. Torn seems really serious to noobs when it comes to confrontations and encourages you to waste your resources.
Crimes: Go in order from the first to the last. Focus on just getting each crime to 100 for now, grabbing unique outcomes (the star) whenever you can. Crimes won't be much of a money maker during your first year, but they'll fast track you towards earning merit points, and that's why it's good to grind them as a noob.
Money: Only spend money on stats if you spend it at all for now. Otherwise, invest in the bank until you have $2B stashed there first.
Afterwards you can find charts that will tell you which stocks have the best return on investments, so you know what to invest in first. Although it's easy to do the math yourself and figure most of that out without help in my opinion.
DO NOT HOLD CASH. You will be mugged often, stash it in a stock.
Items: Weapons and armor don't mean much if you don't have stats to justify the gear. Avoid spending money on weak perks even if you're desperate for a stronger weapon. The right perk is worth a lot more than higher damage & accuracy values.
Also consider how much you could be boosting your stats permanently, with the same amount of money that you'd spend on that piece of gear that you want.
Note - I think one of the most valuable pieces of ranked war gear to start with would be a riot helmet, because it protects your face and also makes pepper spray useless, which is the noob temporary weapon of choice. That one piece of gear saved me in fights many times over during my first year in torn.
Education:
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Sports Science - Unlocks 1% permanent boost to gym gains. Get this first no matter what. Faction leaders might push you to get the blood bag related perks from biology first, but that helps them a little more than it helps you, in the beginning when you're on a team that doesn't pay much to begin with.
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Biology - 2127, 2360, 2370, and 2410 for the 3% to crit. Very bang-for-buck over all.
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Combat training - This is mostly because it takes so long to raise experience for individual weapons, so you want to start as early as possible. Like Sports Science, you won't feel the benefit right away, but you'll be glad you got it early on. You might be tempted to go for stat percentage boosts first. Consider that a 1% to 3% boost in a stat means less when your stats are very low, but means a lot more when they're higher.
Note - You could opt to get PSY2670 and PSY2660 before starting combat training if you want the largest stat boosts for the shortest amount of education time first, but make combat training your third finished degree unless you're strongly against fighting and just want to focus on trade and crimes.