If you’re new to Dired and like to learn visually (as compared to, say, reading about a subject), Kenny Meyer has an interesting screencast on Dired basics that you may enjoy. He covers
- Copying files
- Deleting files
- Renaming files
- Creating new directories
- Compression and decompression of files
- Changing file modes
- Changing other file metadata
- Marking and unmarking files
- Operations on multiple files
Meyer is promising further screencasts so if you like this one, you may want to subscribe.