I don't crate train but that is a personal preference.
House training is a full time job 24/7 for several weeks, you cannot let the little one out of your site/mind until the training is accomplished. Most of us work, so if you can devote one entire weekend to getting started then you can make great strides towards getting one trained. There are several great books out that can help, "
Cesar's Way", by Cesar Milan is one, another great book called "
The New Better Behavior In Dogs" by william E. Campbell that offers some great ideas. His chapter on Housetraining is fairly short, but he goes into the dynamics of training, which I love. There are others out there, but I like the ones that require me to work on
ME first and the dog second.
The major problem with training is that we speak different languages, we speak with words and dogs learn primarly by body language. Since we cannot teach the dogs to speak English, then we must learn body language "doggie style".