I think that when you're first getting into portrait photography you automatically gravitate towards continuous lighting simply because of its WYSIWYG characteristics. However, the previous poster is quite right in saying that a continuous light gets very, very hot and is not comfortable to sit under for any length of time. I bought a 1000 watt continuous light from Steve Kaeser's website (like this one), and while I was happy with it for a while, I found off-camera flashes to be much more useful and ideal in most situations.