Hey Dingo,
I tend to think you're better off having a basic idea of just what the heck something is doing when you try to use a tool. A number of folks roll their eyes back in their heads and snooze off when I go on a ramble (in person or in text), but I tend to find it helps. There are some good books out there (or so I hear) but one quick free place to start is the Nebulosity manual. Yea, a chunk of it is about the program itself and you can skip those parts, but there are a lot of general / theory bits in there as well. Having written it (disclaimer), I'm a bit biased of course and there are bits of it that are getting long in the tooth, but I thought I'd put it out there.
http://www.stark-labs.com/downloads_...osity2Docs.pdf
Craig