Yeah I agree with jake, I guess i am kinda of a newbie too, but i can tell you something the dev kits are an ausom platform to learn from, there is plenty of stuff on the dev boards you can use to start your altera adventure.
Id advise trying out all the cool examples available in the nios installation direct
C:\altera\80\nios2eds\examples another thing to look at is
http://www.altera.com/support/ip/processors/nios2/ips-nios2_support.html which i assume you might have already seen, it has some cool documents, there is one somewhere in there which tells you about making your first nios system...
regards nadeem