Personally I did not find the Sick automation system very useful. While it worked ok with the sites that were provide adding in new ones that you scrapped was more trouble than it was worth.
Xrumer is awesome without a doubt but I would not recommend it to someone new to automation. Buy yourself a ubot based bot or two to start with, you can purchase them outright for less than $40 and they work pretty well. While they are obviously not as fast as xrumer the learning curve is small so you can be up and running in no time. Use scrapebox to find new sites to use and you can easily build 1k links a day.
Once you have the automation process down and really understand how to scrape and clean your lists to the point you have a few thousand sites to use then think about moving up to xrumer if you find that you need to build more links than your existing bots can handle. The transition will be somewhat easier and you will have a good list of sites to start with.