Musical Notation
For a comprehensive list of musical symbols, including note and rest values, check out the Wikipedia article:
For the names of the notes, and to see how the keys on the piano map onto the notes on the page, take a look at these diagrams:
Early Repertoire
If you are an early student, sets of simple piano exercises can be the best way to learn to read music and find your way around the keyboard. From there, you can move onto pieces which are longer and more musical, but still intended for beginners. Although there are many commercial books, much is available for free. Here are some great examples:
And some extra exercises:
Technical work
Since most music is fundamentally based on the notes of a scale, it is essential that pianists master these in all twelve keys. There are a number of other commonly encountered patterns which must also be learnt - especially the chromatic scale, arpeggios, dominant and diminished sevenths, and double octaves. The notes along with the recommended fingering for these can be found in the appendix of Schmitt (above).
