Yinyangwolf, I'd heartily reccommend you try making an animal that doesn't require mesh editing first, for practice, because some of your queries are very basic to animal-making and I wouldn't want you to get frustrated this early in the game!
Just the coding itself can be overwhelming, not even touching editing meshes! I wish you good luck with your projects, but I would seriously consider making other user created content first before venturing into model editing.