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Excellent expansion to Walt's article; I'll probably be sending this on to my mother, who I frequently have to help with OS X since the copy of Windows on her Boot Camp partition started assaulting her with pr0n popups (naturally I thought "why waste time fixing it when there's already an alternative handy that isn't broken?"). There are just a couple of things I might add as well:

• Another way to think of the Dock's behaviour in terms of handling applications is that, quite simply, it brings up an app when you click on its Dock icon, whether it's running or not. If it's already open in the background, it merely brings it forward for you to interact with; if it isn't running, it opens it for you. When I grasped that each icon is sort of an "I want this, no matter what" button, it made a bit more sense to me than it already did.

• For keyboard shortcuts, another great way to find out what they are is simply to trawl through the menus. Any menu command that also has a corresponding keyboard shortcut shows that shortcut on the right-hand side of the menu item. Apple doesn't make it readily evident what a few of the symbols they use are supposed to represent, so:

⌘ is the Command key (as previously mentioned),

⌥ is the Option (a.k.a. Alt) key,

⇧ is the Shift key, and

⌃ is the Ctrl key.

• Exposé can also show you just the windows of the currently-in-use application (granted, I don't know anyone who's used that function, but it's there), or throw all the windows out of the way to let you see the desktop and interact with the icons on it.

Another important and very useful thing to know about Exposé is that you can trigger and use it even while you're in the middle of dragging something with the mouse! If you want to, say, get a file from a Finder window into one of those file upload fields in Safari (the ones with a "Choose File" button) instead of navigating all the way through to the file again using the sheet that normally slides down, you can start dragging the file, then press the Exposé key (or flick the mouse at the appropriate screen corner, if you have one assigned to Exposé) without letting go of the mouse button, hover over the Safari window for a second — it'll blink a couple of times and zoom to the front — and release the mouse button to drop the file right on the field. Like explaining OS X's window-closing behaviour, it sounds more complicated than it is, being in reality more like one smooth action punctuated by a key-press or two. I'd used my Mac for over two years before I realized I could even do this instead of using the "hard way".