This may have been asked before but I dont even know how to search the forum for this question

Its really two questions.

1) What does it mean when a filename (or directory name?) is starts with a . (dot). Are these supposed to be hidden files?
E.g. .myFile will not be shown by "ls" but only "ls -a"

2) Why do I see many times references to filenames in commands preceded by the ./ instead of just the filename in the current directory E.g:

#cat ./someFile instead of #cat someFile

I am guessing so its to force to use the file from the current directory to avoide searching environment paths.
P.S. I know the meaning of . and ..

If there is a link somewhere where these things are discussed I would appreciated.

1) Yes it is used to hide files - like the hidden file attreibute in windows.
2) With cat there should be no need to use "./" This should really only be used for running executeables in hte current directory. When you cat a file it won;t look in your path.

Ok, why wouldn't the shell search the current directory first for the executable?

Is there some tutorial I can read on this stuff? WHat would I search under.

The bash will only search the directoies in the path variable - to see your paths:
echo $PATH|sed s/\:/\\n/g

The bash howto probably has most of this in it:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bash-Prog-Intro-HOWTO.html