Before mining, you should decide if it is worth it or not for you. You have to decide this for yourself, based on your power costs and the hardware that you have available. There are many sites, such as [CryptoCompare](https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/xmr)that allow you to enter your miner's speed and power draw, and it will show you the profit (or loss) per week/month.
Before starting, you already need to have a wallet configured and working. The pool needs to know your wallet address to be able to send payments there. See the [Accepting Monero guide]({{ site.baseurl }}/get-started/accepting) for more information.
Binaries are available for multiple distributions and operative systems, but you can also build the miner by yourself. Take a loot at [XMrig's docs](https://xmrig.com/docs/miner)
Choosing a larger pool means that you will see more frequent (but smaller) payouts, but choosing a smaller pools helps keep the network decentralised. [Miners will not lose any revenue by mining on a smaller pool](https://redd.it/g6uh2l).
[Consider using Tor to connect to the pool](https://xmrig.com/docs/miner/tor) (or to a hidden service pool like HashVault, RespectXMR and MoneroOcean). This hides mining activity from your ISP, and prevents the pool from knowing who you are.
Find the line in config.json that says `algo: null` and change it to `algo: "rx/0"`. By default, XMRig expects the pool to tell it which hashing algorithm to use.