How easy is it to carry out de novo sequence assembly?
You can try looking around biostars.org, which is like stackexchange, but for bioinformatics.  

Velvet is one example of a de novo assembler.  

But 30 bp is really short, and animals have big genomes (not as tough as lots of plants and fungi, but still tough)

What you would get is a bazillion short contigs.  It would not be pretty.