Scott Kelby's book Lightroom 2 stays on my desk as a constant reference tool. It is amazing. Take a peek at it in B/N and you will begin to grasp some of the things that LR can do. I've been using it since the original beta came out and I am still learning new things about it (that's how much depth the software has). I hardly ever use iphoto. Iphoto duplicates your pictures so it takes up twice the space on your hard drive. The only reason I have used iphoto is when I want to load pics to my imac account through iweb.
But I just found a link the other day which would walk me through how to load from the web browser in LR into my imac account (something that has been confusing to me in the past). Here is the link for that if anyone is interested:
How do you upload to .MAC (dot Mac) from the Lightroom Web Module? - Lightroom Journal
Also, here is a great thread from Scott Kelby's blog from awhile back where people posted their LR questions all day and Scott and others chimed in with answers. It is another valuable resource.
Scott Kelby's Photoshop Insider Blog » Photoshop & Digital Photography Techniques, Tutorials, Books, Reviews & More Blog Archive What I Learned About Lightroom at Joe McNally’s Workshop
Katrina, I love, love, love smart collections. I set up a smart collection for each one of my kids names, for 3 star photos. The beauty of smart collections is that as I add pics to my library it will always look for the pictures that match my criteria and add to the collection. So at any given moment I can click on Angela and all of the best pics of her will be there from the whole year.