Welcome to Flyertalk! Yes, it is a great community. The above post was great with a lot of information. I suggest you do two additional things: 1) Go to some airline web sites and read their official program descriptions, see what sales they have and bonuses they have. American Airlines has a great web site for all of this. If you register there (free) you can even personalize it to show you fare sales between certain cities. 2) On either Expedia, or another travel site or airline site look up some fares and read the detailed fare rules.

These two bits of information will let you sort of triangulate some of the stuff we talk about here. Have fun!