Installation of further packages

[stephan.sens]

Hello there,   My name is Stephan and I have a problem installing further packaged of debian on my computer.   I successfully downloaded Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 r3 "Sarge" - Official i386 Binary-1 and burned it on a bootable CD-R. My computer (i386) was able to boot from this CD and installed a ‘basic’ system (Germany Time, Keyboard, Desktop partion, ect.) Unfortunately I have no Linux background and I am not able to install further packages?!   My thinking was to download the first three ISO Binary images 31r3 on CD and start from there but it looks like that the right format is .deb or tar.gz.  It was possible to unzip tar.gz files but after ./configure some error messages were displayed telling me compilers ect. are missing.   What is the right installation procedure of the packages to build up a system from scratch able to office programs, to have internet access, be able to print?  What can I do with these three iso binary images? Any use of 1.8GB of data and if yes, how can I use them?   Sorry to bother you but I couldn’t find an answer to my basic question even not in my books which deals more with SUSE or Red-Hat. They make it easy just to mount CD1, CD2, … but I would like to build the system from scratch.   If there is any book you can recommend, please, do so!  English books are welcome!   Thank you very much for your patience and your support.   Have a nice day.   Best regards,   Stephan Sens