Yes, find a pro shop and shoot some; they typically have indoor shooting ranges right in the pro shop; ask a lot of questions; if you have more than one pro shop, check a couple out to see which one you get better service at. Because you'll probably want to be going back year after year to have them check your bow out & tune it, etc., unless you really get into it and learn how to do that yourself and buy the necessary tools for tuning, re-stringing, etc.
And also, remember that on a lot of these new-fangled compound bows, though generally very good, generate a lot of their extra power (relative to pull weight) by having a low to very low brace height. Problem with that is that it's a tradeoff - the lower the brace height, the more magnified your errors in release are (affecting accuracy). So more of a medium to high brace height is probably preferred for beginners - such a bow is more forgiving on the release, and almost assuredly still has plenty of power to penetrate and kill your game easily. Have the pro shop gentlemen show you the brace height issue, and again, just shoot some to see which shoots well for you.
In the old days, it was Bear, Ben Pearson, Browning, & PSE (many moons ago). Now, a couple of these are still hanging in there, but Hoyt & Matthews are some of the most popular brands. Oneida, a few others too. Like most things, you're gonna get *generally* what you pay for. EXCEPT that a lot of bow guys are like motorcycle guys - they must have the latest & greatest every year. So the bows are numbered by model year, of course. The shops have a hard time selling the older years' models that are still hanging around in their stores, so they'll mark them down dramatically, especially if they're 2 years old or older. My current bow, for example, was brand "new" / never used when I bought it in the summer of 2004, but it's a 1999 model (Hoyt Aspen), so it was 5 years old at the time! So the price tag had been cut 50% twice, from $700 to $350 finally to $175.