New to OS X - How do I navigate through finder?
You can drag the home and root folders to the sidebar. They used to be there by default, but they were removed in 10.7.



I have also removed all of the default locations, so the root folder of column view windows is always ~/ or /.

⇧⌘G opens a Go to Folder sheet. It can also be opened by pressing ~ or / in file dialogs.



You can show the path at the bottom by checking View > Show Path Bar:



There is also a hidden preference for showing the path on the title bar:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool true
killall Finder