If you are not thoroughly familiar with the basics of exposure, get yourself there (easy). Otherwise, just get comfortable with all the new external controls you have. When I got my d7000 way back when, I played with it in front of the tv at night. It helps getting the fingers comfortable and finding things without thinking. Being a tech guy, I also enjoyed going through the menus line by line and trying to understand each item. As situations came up, I was able to recall that I saw something about that in a menu somewhere, haha. Another thing I did that might be a little extreme, I reset the camera often in the early weeks. Helped me to learn to find the settings that were important to me. I found the little help blips from pressing the '?' button reasonably useful.