Probably the best way is to find a time machine and go back a few years. 

buying any asic, is atleast 4x more expensive than the production cost of an asic, so you are already 4x behind miners such as antpool. because they literally make and run the rigs at cost price.
 for instance an antminer is at retail prices of $1000.. cost price under $250

even if you managed to get free electric. you can make bitcoin. but the time to get ROI is still along time due to the cost of the asic.

in short unless you can get a rig at cost/wholesale prices you dont have much chance of making profit within the year and should only consider it if you are thinking long term of HOLDING bitcoin. and not spending them. for instance you will pay for electric and more ASICS with fiat you already have, not with the mining rewards..

anyone thinking that when they mine they can just sell the reward and use the funds to pay for bills, will never break even. your only chance is to hoard. which is why people now prefer just to buy the bitcoin and hoard, rather than waste the time and electric mining it. because in the end it totals about the same but u atleast have the hoard from day one

I don't know how you defined the "different ways" of mining bitcoin because as far as I know, there is only one way and that way is to get your hashing power as high as possible to get the most profit.

Generally, you'd need quite a good amount of capital to start mining plus, you need to consider all your maintenance fees, especially the electricity. Right now, only those who have dirt cheap electricity is able to mine bitcoins efficiently.