What? & How?

So knitting trials I have come across in the past 5 days. Well, for starters is the overwhelming amount of information that seems to be out there about knitting. I mean being a person who works plastic canvas and knowing how difficult it is to find information about it I am feeling both excited and overwhelmed about the amount of information there is on knitting. However, I am finding that most of the information is geared toward more experienced knitters. Basically, what I have to do is read a paragraph, find out what the abbreviations stand for, and find out what the long form is. I am sure many people have had to go through this but I wish that there was more geared to beginners. The abbreviations are everywhere and sometimes they are not just stitch abbreviations there are abbreviations for project status. Those are difficult to find on the web so then you are left taking a guess as to what this means. Which is fine depending on the context and assuming it is not surrounded by six other abbreviations. I find this alot on ravelry. While I love the information and people and services offered by ravelry the forums are sometimes hard to understand.
So I am working on a garter stitch scarf. Basically, all you have to do is repeat the knit stitch over and over. Somehow I have managed to screw up multiple times. First, by adding additional stitches. Not really sure how I accomplished this but I did. Not only did I do it once but a few times so now I am counting my stitches everytime. Second, somehow I ended up with a hole. I must have dropped a stitch somewhere and I am not sure how to fix it. I am going to push on though. At this point it is about trying to get used to knitting and not being uncomfortable when I do it.