As uplandhunter870 said, read Scott Kelby's books
He has an awesome way of making things understandable to a beginner.
Another tip, ditch the preset setting on your camera, use AV or TV and learn
Learn about shutter speeds and aperture.
Shoot in RAW
Good software. Lightroom Or Elements
And
ISOSetup something simple to shoot that won't change light source or move. Then start taking pictures.
Change your aperture, take a couple more. Reset your aperture, then change your shutter speed. Reset shutter, then change ISO etc....
That will help you see how they interact together.
Backup your RAW files, with the RAW files you can change all you want with post processing and still have the original untouched.
There are times I do shoot in jpg, but 90% I shoot is raw.
Here is how I process my photos after a day shooting.
Upload to a directory on my laptop. Your folder naming convention will play havoc later if you do not think about it now. I label mine like this
"2013 4_21_13 Park with kids"
This keeps the directories structure sorted by date/name.
You can upload straight into Lightroom or what ever post possessing software you prefer, but I like a clean directory structure for later.
After upload, I open Lightroom, and synchronize the new directories. In Lightroom, I quicly scan through all the photos using the click zoom feature to determine if the shot is even in focus, if not I delete it.
Then I go back through and do my post processing.
Cropping is your friend, if the shot is in focus, I can usually find something worth cropping and keeping. This is where post processing software saves me. If you shoot anything like me, I may get something in the shot that looks great, but not necessarily what I was intending. Have you ever tried to shoot a large group of kids and have all of them with smiles, no fingers up the nose or crying? LOL.
Crop out the crap, and save what you like.
I also rate my photos, I can later filter the higher rated shots to be uploaded to my Smugmug account, burnt to disk or whatever.
After post processing, Backup to an external drive (I use a NAS drive), remember you can always reprocess the same photo differently as long as you have the RAW (or JPG).
This seems to work for me, but there are endless ways of doing the same thing.
