I been playing NL holdem for 12 years. I played Stud maybe 2 times just for fun.

Are stud starting hands similar to hold em? Like pairs, AK, AQ, AJ, ect...? Or is it so different that I should probably invest in a good book?

In holdem, you should know from flop texture whether or not to remain in the hand. At what point in stud should you know whether to remain?

No, stud hands are in no way like holdem hands. You start with 50% more cards, for one thing, and you can see roughly 5x as many cards to start (at a full table you can see your down cards and 8 up cards, a total of 10. That's 20% of the whole deck right there in front of you.

I question whether you can really "know from the flop texture" whether to stay in a hand in holdem, but even if that assertion is true, there's not a simple analogue in stud.

I recommend "Seven Card Stud for Advanced Players" from 2+2

I sort of disagree with this. I'd consider 5th street to be a fairly close analogue. Assuming bets have gone into the pot, and you call the big bet (or bet yourself) on 5th, the pot is likely to be so large compared to bets on the next streets that it would relatively rarely make sense to fold. As Zee/Sklansky say in the Advanced Stud book, the decision on fifth is "a close second in importance" to the decision on 3rd - i.e. your decision to even play at all.

And I'd recommend, before reading the Advanced Stud book, the Chip Reese chapter on Stud in SuperSystem, which is the one chapter in that book which I think has aged very well.

The key word there is simple. A lot of the decision hinges on exposed cards and there are a lot of them so there are a lot more cases.

its way less monoton to play than holdem.
the way you play your hand on 3rd depends a lot more on what you see that your opponents have as a doorcard, same on later streets.
playing drawing hands becomes a lot more fun, cause you can see if your flushdraw is live or not by seeing up to 7 other cards open before you even enter the pot.
also playing deceptive can earn you a lot in some spots, but often also increases variance.

like rusty said, get "stud for advanced players", ive read it and its simply great.
together with ray zee's split-poker (stud8/omaha8) book, its the best ive ever read about poker.

watch the judges game scene in Rounders and then tell me if you still think stud is similar enough to HE

That must have been razz since he folded rolled kings.

The lesson here being that every live low-limit stud game has an average age just north of 60.

Don't listen to these clowns. If you get AA go all in on third.

Whenever I learn a new game (and I like learning new games a lot), I find that it works best for me when, at least initially, I completely recalibrate instead of trying to carry over concepts from other games.

Of course it is good to look for analogies between different games, but I prefer to do this only once I have obtained a reasonable grasp of the basics of the game I am learning to play. So when I play stud, I think of what would be good stud hands, instead of what hold'em-like hands might be good for stud. (Of course, these sets are not disjoint either.)

I WISH judges would play razz, I'd have probably won 3 robes and a gavel by now.