How can someone coming from Windows learn Mac OS X file system and Finder? I have recently purchased a Macbook Pro and I am very impressed with the machine and OS X. Coming from Windows the one thing I have struggled with is the file system and the Finder application. I suppose I am very used to drag and drop of files in Windows Explorer. As a aspiring Mac developer, should I ditch Finder altogether and use the Terminal only?

Also, whenever I am trying to decide where to put a document or file I wonder what all the directories in the UNIX file system are for and where files should go, and I end up just putting it somewhere and it seems to be a real mess now :). 

Do you know of any resources/ tutorials that would be of any help?
In windows you got:


Desktop, and
My Documents


On OS X:


You got $HOME folder ( represented as ~ which also comes from OSX's unix heritage) . Here is the usual and expected place for user files. Your Documents, Music, Downloads as well as the Desktop folders all live in your home folder. 


So, everything, what is YOURS put into $HOME folder somewhere. Make your own hierarchy if the default one is unpleasant or unuseful. 


Music, Movies, Pictures are - as in windows
Public - your own Shared folder
Documents - for your documents
of course, you can make any number of sub-folders in your HOME.


Applications belong in /Applications or ~/Applications folder. You can put them in the another place too and OSX will find and run applications no matter where they are stored. You can make hierarchy here too, as I told once in my older post.

One more thing - Fonts, you can put fonts into $HOME/Library/Fonts, or into /Library/Fonts (for all users)

For the start, this is enough. Don't touch other folders yet (you don't need). If something needs to be used by multiple users on the same Mac, generally store it in /Users/Shared or change the permissions in the alternate place you store them. 

for the common unix standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard