By and large, Forschners are the best knives for low money. Props to mastersniper.
The most basic, complete set of knives include a chef's knife, a bread knife, a slicer, and a petty or paring knife. You can get away without a slicer if you don't do a lot of portioning.
The chef's knife is the most important blade in your kit. An 8" chef's knife won't either punish bad knife skills or reward good ones in the same way a 10" knife will. If you want to be an efficient cook, to cut consistent sizes, and have enough control to cut thin, it's important to learn the basic sills of pinch grip, "claw," and the basic cuts (blocking, planking, sticking and dicing). If you're committed to learning them, you might as well just skip to a 10" blade. If you want to cut inutitively go 8", or even with a
santoku.
The modern trend in paring knives, or rather instead of a paring knives, is something called a "petty." It's a regular paring knife shape, but longer. Somewhere between 4-1/2" and 7" long, and unless you do a lot of intricate, small work it will probably be more useful to you than a 2-1/2" - 4" parer. If you do decide you'd like to try a petty, and you're also staying within the Forschner fold, don't look for it by name.
This is the equivalent in Rosewood. IIRC, Forschner doesn't make a smooth edged equivalent in Fibrox -- it's serrated.
I don't usually recommend serrated knives, but
the little, $4 serrated Fibrox can be very useful. So useful that I know a few pros who use them as their only small knives. You can't really sharpen one, but they're cheap enough that when it gets too dull you can just throw it away.
Thinking about which knife to buy is sexy. But the big deal with knives is keeping them sharp. No dull knife is a good knife. Forschners are fairly sharp out of the box, but they don't hold an edge particularly well. That means you're going to have to invest in some sort of sharpening system -- including but also going beyond a "steel," and actually use it.
Also, you'll need a decent sized, reasonable quality cutting board as well; whether wood, Sani-Tuff or poly. No glass, no stone, no small cheese boards. If you're going Forschner, a poly board is plenty good for awhile. A bad board will wreck your knives. A small board won't allow you to use a reasonable sized blade. If you can't keep a decent board in your kitchen, you might as well just get a
steak knife from the thrift store and let the "knife set" idea go for awhile.
I presume the knife case or roll is to keep your knives away from your roomies. Good idea.
BDL