You will find that most of the software you installed with your Linux distribution will quickly become outdated. You can give your thanks to the hundreds of Linux hackers out there who patch programs, upgrade them, and send them out. One excellent example is the Linux kernel. Whichever distribution you bought, you can bet that it came with an older kernel than the one available now.
Most distributions come with software package managers.
The most common is the RedHat Package Manager, or rpm for short. However, other distributions have their own package manager. Slackware has pkgtool and Debian has dpkg . This NHF will not be based on installing and uninstalling software through the use of package managers. Rather, it will cover the basics of installing software from source, as well as how to remove software as painlessly as possible.