A few questions to digital artists.

1) Do you prefer Photoshop or SAI (I've seen some people do work in Illustrator, but I'll stay away from vector work for now).

This really depends on what you're doing. I enjoy how simple SAI is for painting since I started off digital stuff playing around on PaintBBS. I enjoyed Painter when I actually did illustration stuff, too. I think a lot of my friends do lineart in SAI and then switch over to Photoshop at some point.

But you should probably get used to Photoshop. There's a lot of time-saving stuff that program can do.

3) Do you have different sets of brush settings saved? If so, what are they and the settings of each?

I suggest you start off with default brushes before working with custom ones.

http://imgur.com/a/y0vcS#0

I think even without knowing what it says, you can see which ones are watercolours, markers, paints, and some ye olde Japanese style brushes. iirc some of these brushes use some kind of texture that I had to go looking for. I can dig them up later if you're interested.

I guess lastly, what would you recommend for practice/getting better...tutorials maybe?

http://youtu.be/eaH_WlD_rP4 part 1
http://youtu.be/XYB6Ztgwd3M part 2