What about starting with learning non-cursive lettering? My niece requested a lettering book a couple of years ago for Christmas and I spent a lot of time at the B&N looking at them trying to pick one to give her. I was disappointed with a lot of them as they seemed really short on actual techniques for drawing, mostly just showing examples of the author's personal work. About that time Mye De Leon came out with her lettering book, and that is the one I ended up getting after finding it in the store and looking through it. It teaches about design concepts along with the actual drawing of letters, which I really liked. How to draw each of the alphabet letters is laid out step by step with pen stroke instructions, and there are practice lines in the book if you want to actually just draw in the book as you learn. The end of the book gives instruction on how to draw lettering compositions like posters with all of the flourishes and such. And she does have script style instructions for the letters as well.
I ended up buying myself a copy too, so if you want to see a few examples from inside the book shoot me a PM here or on FB
https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Han...1631318&sr=8-2