I reccomend purchasing IJava's Guide http://www.sythe.org/showthread.php?t=1288141
if your looking to purchase a guide on making forums successful and stuff, but if you want some free forum software my favs are
MyBB which im currently running on my forum, its updated regularly and has a lot of good plugins (http://community.mybb.com/) and only mods+ will be able to see your IP unless you set regular users to be able to see IP's which probably isn't a good idea

