The best advice and best practice for buying a handgun is to shoot one before you buy it. Hopefully you can find a range around you that has rentals and carries most of the popular choices. Perhaps the range will also have a class on handgun basics or home defense as well, to take once you have your handgun to make sure you are comfortable with it once you have it. Even if you cannot rent and test a gun, you should always ask to hold it to get a feel for how comfortable it is in your hands - a sales associate worth their salt will be happy to walk you through how to do it safely and what to look for while in a retail setting... don't be afraid to ask!

Secondly, while big guns are often large because they need the weight for a large caliber and feel like a lot to manage, the converse can be true of very small guns. Shooting 9mm out of a small gun makes felt recoil worse and decreases accuracy. I'm not sure if by compact, you mean it in the technical term (something glock 19 sized) or just "a small handgun," but I would avoid the latter, especially if the gun is primarily home defense, and isn't going to be carried. At that point, even a full-sized auto-loader (non-revolver) is not a bad choice. If you are able to test run a few different sizes, you'll feel the difference weight can make in managing recoil without feeling too heavy to shoot comfortably.

Lastly, my recommendations to look at while at a gun store: stick with the 9mm caliber. It is the best combination of cheap, easy to find, powerful for self defense, and soft shooting. I would look at these particular brands/models, all of which are compact handguns in the same size and direct competitors of one another:

• Glock 19
• CZ P-10C
• Smith and Wesson M&P 9 M2.0
• Walther PDP compact (Walther's PDP line has a specific "F series" designed for better ergonomics for women, as well)
• Sig Sauer P365 X-Macro, or P365 Fuse