I've been a member of Stack Overflow for a while and have this week been given a project of having a play around with SharePoint 2010 to see how it works basically, as we're looking to use it to replace our existing intranet site sometime soon.
We have a consultant coming in to help us in the next few months but really at the moment I'm starting from a base of knowing almost nothing about SharePoint, so I've been told to get up to speed. I've looked into it over the past two weeks and what tasks it can do etc, but now I'm actually having a play with it and seeing how you administer SharePoint 2010
and perform tasks within it.
So what I'm looking for here are any materials that people have found useful when learning about SharePoint. I'm not looking for development materials as yet (I come from a C# programming background), but just administration stuff, like how to pull AD usergroups into SharePoint groups, creating sites where users can enter their own newsfeeds and any handy tips or tricks.
edit Other introductions are also welcome such as development and designing.