Welcome aboard wutzthedeal!
Always good to get some new people to harass, err, I mean help.
Some good advice from Spraug.
I tell people to make extreme use of the first tutorial. Use it to practice diving, finding targets, everything you will need to do. Use it to learn the controls.
Then, do a campaign for a practice as Spraug wrote.
As you get more comfortable, then add mods and experiment with them.
As far as manual targeting/auto targeting, I don't like the manual targeting. To me, it's an exercise in tedium.
Now go wax the conning tower.