Best way to find the planets and the moon?....for the Moon...look up
You can't miss it
For the bright planets (Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, Mars), grab your books and your software, read up and learn about the constellations and how to run your software, then take your books etc, off to an astronomy club in your area and mix with the seasoned observers. They'll show you where the objects are and then you can relate that to your charts. Practice, practice, practice....that's the only way to learn where things are and how to recognise the constellations. After awhile, where things are will become second nature to you. For those dimmer planets and such, you'll need binoculars or a telescope to see them. Then it's a matter of recognising star patterns and asterisms to navigate to the objects in question. Then you have to know what they look like to tell them apart from stars etc. You'll also get to learn what other objects look like....nebulae, globular clusters, open clusters, galaxies etc. It all comes with experience and that means time out under the stars.