Buying Options - Newby Questions - Help Greatly Appreciated!

Hi Everyone,

I am new to the site and really appreciate everyone here, the back/forths, Turd's insights, etc. I own physical silver and want to gamble with some funny money to try and leverage the funny money into even funnier money and continue to stack. I'm obviously not the first to think of this :) I've traded other products with some success in the past. I have never traded options. I suppose the complexity has kept me away. Any basic tips on buying mining share company options and index options would be greatly appreciated. Please, anything and everything, no matter how simple and basic it is. I would really appreciate hearing from everyone with experience. A few tips will probably help me to avoid some basic mistakes.

For example. There are options on SLV that expire in 8 days. I was interested in a 26.5 call this morning and could have picked it up for about .42. It was at .50 last time I checked. Does this mean I pay $42 for every option and if I wanted to sell it now or later let's say for .50 that's $50 and I make the difference minus fees? Or, if I hold it and it actually shoots up towards my call price pretty quickly, say with 5 days left we are close to 26.5, how do I calculate how much that option that I bought for .42 might be worth then? I know there are lots of nuances but any generalized examples would really help.

Cheers.