

Honestly, I don’t think it’s possible to get by just trusting any particular guide without developing at least some actual understanding of the concepts underlying what you’re doing. The field is just too wide and rapidly changing for any source of info to be authoritative (and stay authoritative indefinitely after the guide is written), so it’s super important to develop the skill of looking up multiple different and possibly conflicting approaches to the task, thinking critically about them, and then synthesizing your own approach that works for your specific situation.
With computer stuff, you can do even better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
TL;DR: your documentation and your shell script (sequence of console commands you run to accomplish the task) can be the same file.
(Dunno what kind of chemistry you do, but you may have already come across this concept in the form of Jupyter notebooks or something like that.)
While I’m at it, I’d also like to mention Ansible and Git, for when you really want to keep good records and have a reproducible setup. Don’t worry about them immediately as it’s probably too overwhelming to learn all at once, but keep 'em in the back of your mind for later.