New to linux and think I am following directions, but here is the problem. New computer with archlinux. Not root authorized, the computer shop put me as secondary root authorized. 1. do I need to put the files in a certain directory first or try to untar them into a directory or will the tar do this? 2. similarly do I need to be in a certain directory to ./config ? Maybe I am skipping steps.

you need root access to install or make any system wide changes, i don't know what this computer shop thinks that there is some sort of secondary root (personally i think the computer shop guy is full of bull-oni) either you got root/admin or you don't...

get the root password, then if you have some sourcecode unpack the tar.gz or tar.bz2 package and cd (change directory) in to the folder with the sourcecode and to compile the source in to a usable package there are three basic commands to do this:

./configure --help (look for any information that can help you)
./configure --prefix=/usr (or any other parameters that --help shows)
make
make install

always read the README and INSTALL files in the sourcecode files and any other documents the author put in it...

but that is basically it for installing sourcecode:

./configure
make
make install

sometimes but not often you will find one that uses imake and to that one you run xmkmf to build a make file before running make, and other times there will be no ./configure and you have to check the Makefile and adjust any parameters manually with a text editor before running make, usually there is not much to do like change the install prefix from /usr/local to /usr

one more thing, don't bother with a .deb package on Arch Linux, check with Arch's home page for any pre-compiled packages, and once you get good at building sourcecode you will find that www.freshmeat.net and www.sourceforge.net are good places to browse for sourcecode packages. be carefull where you download sourcecode from because now that Linux is gaining in userbase and popularity i would not doubt that there could possibly be malware made for Linux hidden in some packages at some untrusted websites...