A Beginners Guide To Reef Keeping

John now has a nice aquarium with lights, pumps and filtration that he feels warm and fuzzy about.
He chose some very nice rock and everything looks amazing.
John finishes cycling the aquarium, witnessing ammonia, nitrite and then nitrate phases. But now there is algae growing, and some brown stuff that looks like snot, oh and some red nasty thing growing on the sand. So John asks around on all the forums he knows for advice. The resonses he receives are all over the place. There are people who recommend treating with various products to remove algae or the nitrates/phosphates that feeds it. There are people who tells him to cook his rock which means placing the rock in a container with a lid on and keep it in the dark for a long period of time. Finaly there are the people who yells at him and tells him his choice in fish/corals/equipment/etc. is horribly wrong and he is a failure and the world will end.....
Here I will suggest what works for me, every time.

John should enjoy what his tank is going through. The algae won't last forever, the cyanobacteria will be ugly but also eventually gone. Algae is simply put, part of a reef. You can choose to accept the presence of algae or you can attempt to manipulate it. This can be done by incorporating an algae filter. This can be an algae turf scrubber or a refugium with macro algae. This will essentially place the algae in a designated area and starve the algae in your display tank. But even with 25% of my total volume designated to hold algae it still took my system about a year to clean up by itself. I didn't do anything to speed up this process. I performed regular husbandry tasks like monthly water changes, sometimes more often, after a year I do one every other month. I pruned the algae in the refugium and I fed my fish. Nothing special to combat anything except patience.

As with most things in life, the answer to everything is simple, the actual work however is difficult to master.
Read about sand beds, algae, corals, fish, equipment reviews and water parameters, the list goes on.