I keep reading tutorials where I'm supposed to enter something into the ADB command line and that it's in my Android sdk/platform-tools. So I find it, click on it, and a black screen comes up for about 2 seconds and while it's up, it scrolls through a bunch of text. So how am I supposed to use this "adb"?
It is called the Android Debug Bridge, and the Android Developers Site documentation does a better job of explaining it than I can:
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/adb.html
If you are looking for the adb command line, navigate to <sdk>/platform-tools/ and run
adb.exe shell
from the command line.