Ed,
The beauty of bass fishing, is no two bass fishermen fish the same way. You get to experiment and see what works best for you and your style, that's what determines what's in your box. To start out with, I'd reccommend some crankbaits, spinnerbaits, buzzbaits, poppers, and plastics (worms, senkos, brush hogs, maybe some grubs). That'll get you started. Just about EVERY type (notice I said TYPE not brand, or style...) of bass lure has it's place, ie spinnerbaits, jigs, jerkbaits etc. They Bassmasters you see on TV and any pro's or am's for that matter have a good selection of just about every lure type available because conditions dictate what lure will work at that given time, and you'd better have 10 of em in every color!!! Every lake has it's colors, but on the senko side, you can't go wrong with watermelon seed, watermelon/red flake or just plain watermelon. Those are my 3 favorites for the senko. Different guys swear by different senko colors, but I like those (you can search the archives on ncbf.com for senko colors and get a good selection). On the more traditional side, crankbaits are generally shad imitating or crawdad imitating. Sometimes you'll go with chartreuse, or bluegill, or chrome, or something like that, it's also a confidence thing, but mostly they're shad or crawdad. The classic jig color is black/blue. Brown is also a good one. Spinnerbaits are easy, chartreuse and white. Can't go wrong, those are the two almost exclusive colors (except for night fishing, then it's black) for spinnerbaits. The tricky part is blade configuration, colorado blades have more thump while willow leaf blades have more flash. Follow the same rule for buzzbaits, chartreuse, white, and black at night (although I do like that delta special, red and black from rodstrainers, during the day too). Poppers are normally shad imitating, you can't really stray too far from that. Now, plastics. Again, some of this is a confidence thing, and there aren't many "set" colors for plastics. They're probably the most variable baits as far as color choice goes. Often it's just "oh, this one looks sweet", or anything that catches your eye. I'd reccommend buying some grubs or worms in some colors that look good to you, fish em, see what works for ya and go from there. If you find that purple's getting bit for ya, look for different purple baits, or baits with purple accents, or stuff like that. I'd say purple is the most common worm color, but it's not set in stone. There's just soooo many colors for plastics, you can't really designate certain colors as "classic" worm colors because of the huge selection. So that's kinda something you get to mess around with. As for LM ID, there's really only northern and florida strain largemouth. The northerns tend to be more aggressive but don't get as big but the floridas tend to get bigger but are wiser. It's tough to distinguish between the two physically, I heard something about their eyes, like pure floridas have solid black eyes while northerns or northern/florida hyprids have gold rims. Then there's spotted bass which look a lot like largemouth only with samller mouths, and they are much smaller, and have teeth on their tongues. And smallies are easy to identify. Ok, I'm done.
-Brian