one of the best little books on options is a short little tract indeed, only about 50 pages. It's free at the montreal exchange. Click publications, guides, scroll down to equity derivatives, click "equity options reference manual."
there are also excellent tutorials on the cboe website, and doesn't IB itself have some good stuff at what they used to call IB college or IB university.
generally, those starting out in options are advised to begin with covered writes, or long stk/shrt call. You're already more than halfway there with your long stk positions.
turning now to puts, these are usually a second-stage strategy. The first thing is to hang with a number of covered calls, just to experience all the myriad tiny details that are involved in options trading.
depending on your experience, i'm not sure if IB will initially allow you to sell uncovered puts. Brokers normally start new options traders off as level ones, who are permitted to write covered calls, buy options, and sell only the options they already own.
i know it sounds very grand in the theory books, about selling puts so as to pick up cheap stock. But there is a strong psychological factor that argues against this. Just ask yourself how you would have felt if, say in the late spring of 2008, you had sold Citibank jan/09 $20 puts. This is an exaggerated example, but i suspect you would have felt extremely unhappy indeed if your counterparty had been able to stick a $2 stock on you for $20.
that being said, i constantly maintain and trade an inventory of short put positions. The purpose is to gain income, never to acquire the stock, although in every case i understand and like the company whose puts i've sold. In a worst case scenario i'd accept stock under assignment with calm and goodwill.
btw, shrt put = long stk + shrt call.
that being said, why wouldn't an investor hold nothing but a ton of short-term fixed income plus a portfolio of short puts. His yield will be the same as if he held gilt-edged stocks and short calls.
answer: because, less often than every decade but certainly within every investor's lifetime, there occurs a watershed breakdown such as the one we've just been through. The rules explode. Trusted strategies, especially the ones enshrined so prettily in the text books, get blown out of the water. So i keep an exceedingly tight rein on my uncovered puts.