Thanks Dave. I feel more at home already. I’m very hardware oriented and feel a lot better now having the actual chip documentation. I’m pretty at home with with the compiler, but I’m glad I saved its full documentation now so thanks for that pointer too. Also, I guess I just didn’t understand how to navigate to the actual library documentation, which was that part that really had me panicking. But now that I’ve found where the marbles are hidden, I think I’m off to a better start now. 
I did have a few more specific questions relating to my first project, but I added them in the post about “sending one byte as fast as possible” (Send 1 byte as fast as possible), as that is close to what I’m needing to do initially.
Thanks again!