Some good places for information:
for suse specific documents here is the best bet
For general stuff you have 1000's of documents at The Linux Documentation Project
Like this one
2 search engines are very usefull,
you have linux specific google searches
vivisimo pulls results from dozens of other search engines and the does a GREAT job sorting them by subject
Most of the time you can find answers to most any questions much faster thru google or whatever then getting a good answer from forums like this one. And probably more accurate descriptions. It's hard to get the facts straight 100% of the time when making a little reply to a place like this.
for the package/installing programs and such:
If you can it's best to find RPM files that work with your distro over compling and installing programs manually.
This is because the guy who made the RPM probably cares enough about the program to look into details of it's operation and whatnot to get it to work correctly. However there are a lot of bad package makers.
The other big advantage over source code is that the RPM is easily uninstallable. Source code installs sometimes have a "make uninstall" option, but normally you just have to go thru and delete the files by hand.
The other gotcha is what is known as "dependances". Unlike Windows most programmers don't pre-package all the files nessicary for operating a program just from a install. They expect that you already have the minimal requirements for installing programs.
For example you have library files. These are files that contain generic instuctions for use in applications. They are the same as DLL files in windows.
For example Gaim. Now the programmers for Gaim want to make a decent instant manager, but they don't want to deal with the task of figuring out how to render pixels on your screen. So they depend on you have X windows installed, they also depend on certian subsystems being installed like the ability to do TCP/IP. Also you have stuff like file dialogs, were you go save as or open and look for a file. They don't want to program those when so many other programs have to do the exact same thing. So instead of each and every program you use having their own version of a "open file" dialog they just put the code in a library file that everybody can use.
That way bunches of programs have have a similar look and feel, and improvements in the UI don't have to be reprogrammed into every program.
This dependancy crap is the real pain-in-the-butt part of installing programs in linux. Usually you can find out what you need by reading the "README" or Install files of a source code tarball. Also software authors usually go thru great pains to make websites and homepages for various programs that can outline what you need to do to install a programs.
HOWEVER people figured out a solution to the dependancy pains. The trouble is that Suse realy doesn't have a proper package managment program.
For example Fedora has Yum and the option to use Apt for rpms. Mandrake has Urpmi (which sucks, IMO). Debian has the uber-wonderfull Apt that they developed with literally tens of thousands programs aviable at your fingertips. Gentoo is a good distro that has the ability to automagicly build itself completely from source code easily.
But Suse doesn't realy have anything that does this natively.
That sucks because, for example, I am a debian user. All I have to do to install gaim is to go (as root) "apt-get install gaim", it will downlad gaim, download any dependances, set them up and install them. All off of the internet, no sweat. No dealing with compiling programs, no worrying about dependances, no having to read READMES. A good package manager can make Linux much easier to install programs then Windows or even Macs.
you can try this though That has a version of Apt4rpm that you can install. Generally to install RPMs you can do the command line "rpm -ivh blah blah blah" but buy double clicking on the file can probably install it thru your GUI enviroment. Just read thru the docs and such.
There are also other places like Freshrpms.net to get packages (also you can set up to use freshrpms thry apt4rpm).
If you don't want to go thru the trouble to install apt and just want the packages themselves you can use a place like
RPMfind.net
Going from windows to Linux can be abrupt, but once you get used to how things are done and get confortable having to do command line everyonce and a while, stuff won't seem so difficult. There are lots of newbie docs out their on the internet can are very helpfull and finding answers for yourself quickly is something that will become second nature.