Mudd Lab has exhaustive stacks of help manuals on everything from learning HTML (how to write a webpage) to writing advanced shell scripts to using Emacs. If you need something, but don't know where to look, I would start there. If they don't have any on the shelves, ask them and they'll print some more.
Learning Unix commands and related Unix resources like Emacs http://www.gnu.org are absolutely essential and you should spend some time working with them before you need them so you won't be frustrated at the last minute because you are not familiar with a command and don't know how to use it. You can check out the official GNU Emacs manual http://www.gnu.org/manual/emacs-20.3/emacs.html or here are some Emacs resources http://www.maths.lancs.ac.uk/ rowlings/Splus/Course99/emacsintro.html, although searches for `emacs introduction', `emacs command' produce a few all right results. There is also some assorted software at Rice IT Software Webpage http://software.is.rice.edu that has things like SSH and license information for X-win.