i'm still a noob but i taught myself by playing with a DSLR so i'll try to put it in terms of important things with those cameras and a simple way of how i look at it
exposure- pretty much common sense, if you've done darkroom photography you know about this, it's how long you expose the film to light, the longer you do, the brighter the picture, and vice versa. your shutter speed and aperture will influence exposure as well as the exposure meter. on a DSLR it's how much light enters the shutter between when it opens and closes. on a DSLR you can hold the A/V button and turn the dial to set your exposure relative to normal, so you can basically make the image darker or lighter
shutter speed- this goes along with exposure as do most settings, the faster the shutter speed the less light is let into the camera. you will see on a bright day you can use fast shutter speeds because there's a lot of light whereas at night you have to use like 30 second speeds to get enough light into the camera to show the image. you also need fast shutter speeds for photographing moving objects, if the shutter is open too long it will look like a blur because you don't freeze the image. shutter speed is usually in terms of fractions of a second, so 250 on your camera will be 1/250th of a second. if you turn the dial enough you will see 0"3 which means 1.3 seconds and then it'll go to 30" which means 30 seconds
ISO- this goes with shutter speed in terms of basic use, the way i think of it is the higher ISO the faster shutter speeds you can get away with. 100 is the lowest and most entry level DSLR's go up to 1600 which will give you a faster shutter speed. that being said, you tend to get a lot of noise at high ISO, noise is just kinda grainy shit around the background which looks bad, so generally try to shoot on a lower ISO but that isn't always an option. for example, at night try to shoot at 100 because you have a tripod but for sports you might need higher to get the faster shutter speeds
aperture- i find this the most important, i usually shoot on aperture priority on a camera. aperture is how wide the shutter goes and i think of it as determining depth of field. it also makes it so that more light gets let into the camera. aperture is counter intuitive, 1.2 is the widest aperture whereas 30 something is the narrowest. if you're shooting on like 5.6 (which is the lowest most stock lenses will go) you will notice that only a small part of the image is in focus and the rest is blurred. this is great for flower or portrait shots because you can get the foreground in focus but the background blurred so it's not distracting. if you want to do a landscape however, you want a narrower aperture so everything in the picture is in focus so you'd pick something like 15 or 20
so yeah those are the basics and how i look at them, but that being said i'm just figuring this out, i started learning these things about a month ago. you just need to get a DSLR, take a ton of pictures on different settings, look at the metadata and compare them, and then you'll know what each setting does...also GOOGLE EVERYTHING!!! i learned so much doing that
hope that was somewhat helpful
