Poke through these links to learn more about IC programming. If you haven't programmed at all before, some of these things may not make much sense, but we'll have plenty of time in lab devoted to learning how to program, so don't worry.
A quick list of Commonly used IC Commands
It might also help to look at three sample programs:
The full Interactive C Manual is online.
The Handy Board Homepage has lots of info about the board, as well as a lot of user-contributed code for doing interesting things (or to look at for examples). It also has the Freeware versions of IC for Mac, Windows, and UNIX.
You may also be interested in the Help! the Handyboard is doing something strange! help page.