Welcome to the programming tutorials. There may look like there's a lot here, but that's because these tutorials have been written with those who have never done any sort of programming in mind and go nice and slowly. Also, there's no need to read all of these before you can start doing fun and interesting things with programming. Each page after the first introduces a new piece of tool kit to play with and suggests ways in which it can be used, so if you only read the first two pages you'll be able to use light, dark and other graphic backgrounds. If you read just one extra page you'll be able to build one-way doors, and so on.
The tutorials have been carefully structured to introduce new concepts in a logical order, and so it's possibly best to go through them in the order given, although the more adventurous might skip some and then come back to them if needed.
If you're new to Places and are still getting to grips with how to build then you may want to go to the main Places page.
Once you've got this all under your belt then you may wish to find out about how to use memories or else learn some more advanced programming skills.