TFS newbie basic question

Depends on the team, I would say. At my old job, we were new to TFS, and the above was all we did. We only ever had one branch of code. At my current job, we have multiple branches, so I now have to know about branching and merging.

Shelving is useful for saving your changes without committing them to the branch.

For your #2, I wouldn't say that is always the case. Sometimes you may have files that aren't really editable, but for which you still need to check out and modify. As an example, one of my projects has a specification document checked into TFS. We publish this spec document along with the website. I have Microsoft Word on my machine, but I cannot guarantee that everyone does--since Word costs money. So whereas I edit my spec document in Word, when I publish the document I publish it as PDF, because Adobe Reader is free, and I can be reasonably assured that most anyone can read a PDF. So whenever I need to update the PDF, I still have to check it out in order to be able to save the updated Word document to the updated PDF>

If your team uses a build server, then you may want to gain a basic understanding of what it provides for you.

Do you use the work item stuff?

And all the exclude/include, I don't really have any idea what the real-life scenario where you would want that?

Oh I see, that makes sense. Thanks.