NQC programming guide

I've been lurking on the forum for some time now, and it's about time I 
asked a few questions.

I've read Mark Overmars' "Programming Lego Robots and using NQC" and am 
going through Dave Baum and John Hansen's "NQC Programmer's Guide". both 
are really excellent, but especially the second appears to assume some 
previous programming knowledge... which I haven't. I read and reread 
certain passages and some things become more evident, but there are 
still huge gaps I need to fill in order for some things to start making 
sense.

For example, I haven't a clue how I could use an array, what a bitwise 
negation, AND, XOR or XOR is, why I would want to use #include, or even 
what the increment of x++ will be.

In order to get a better idea of some things I've tried to read through 
some NQC programs, but although I can usually identify what each large 
code block is for I cannot always see why and how.

I'm beginning to think I should find some supplemental material, some 
n00b guide to programming, and I was wondering if anyone could suggest a 
good (online or downloadable) resource. Any other suggestion is also 
greatly appreciated.

linmix