I do not know much of the doctrinal fine points of Calvinism (or Reformed Christianity if you prefer). Mainly what each of the 5 points of TULIP Calvinism is and isn't, and what Hyper-Calvinism is. Also this isn't meant to bait people into debate; I honestly just want to know.
When we're talking about calvinism, we would in objective terms be talking about classical, historical calvinism or creedal calvinism. We would not be talking about ideas, personalities and movements which may well have had some influence from Calvin or classical calvinism, and could even be called "calvinistic" by others, but which cannot rightly be said to be calvinist. One such example would be hyper-calvinism, an antinomian deviation from calvinism, which has been discussed at some length in the thread "The error of eternal justification" at this forum. But here, we'd start at the beginnings.
If you want to learn the basics about Calvin and calvinism then I don't recommend that you start off with reading works by english puritans, revivalists as Whitefield and Edwards or baptist preachers like Spurgeon. While this would be good and edificial reading for other purposes, it will not lay a sufficient foundation for understanding the task as these figures all represent later developments of calvinism. There are a lot of unbiased and well written academical works on both Calvin and calvinism available, search engines are your friend to get what you look for.
Of course, you can't do the math here without reading something from Calvin himself. To read even fair amounts of what he wrote is a huge lot of reading tho, which I assume you hardly would set apart the time for, I would then suggest begin reading excerpts from the
Institutes and highlighted parts of his Bible commentaries. Much of his Bible commentaries is actually great reading, Calvin as Bible expositor is direly underrated. Probably much so due to his wrongs in Geneva. Anyway, that would give you a good glimpse into his thought. If you come from roman-catholic background it would not be so hard for you to understand some of his thinking if you have read up a little on Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
This said I will stress that it nevertheless is not possible to fairly understand Calvin's thought without well understanding the concept of covenants in his systematic theology, on which precepts the Bible is to be studied and its doctrines be applied thru same. If one fails to do so, even if he's calvinist, he will get a calvinism that takes directions that Calvin did not intend. After Calvin's death his successor Beza codified Calvin's teachings into a system whose articulations became a matter of dispute. This may be seen in the lapsarian debate with mainly infra vs supra parties (I personally reject all lapsarian views as speculative, and I doubt Calvin himself was interested in defining any such position). Less than two decades after Calvin's death at only 54 the so called
First Reformation was over and further developments arose.
