Deep neural net modelling strategy
I cannot recommend highly enough this online book on neural networks.

The tricky part about neural networks is the stuff you mentioned -- what value to use for the learning rate, what topology to use for the network, etc etc -- we call these things hyperparameters to distinguish from parameters which are estimated by the optimization process.

This big section of the aforementioned book covers exactly that. I don't know if you'll find what you want though. The reason is because there is no silver bullet.