man pages?
 

a) is the term 'man pages' an acronym?

b) what is the deeper purpose of the information offered therein? It appears to be a techno-geek level explanation of a particular item, but are codes available, or useable downloads on tap? etc.? etc.?:

:Pengy: :newbie:

a) man is a command and stands for manual - as in instruction book. To see the manual for bash:
man bash
b) The deeper purpose is to find out what the author intended the software to do and also give usage instructions and examples.

Not sure what you mean by "codes" or "useable downloads" though.

man is short for manual.
It's useful for many things, but only gives information. I'm not sure what you mean by codes, but it does tell you (if you're looking at the manpage of a command) the various options.
Generally you just type man followed by a command or possibly file you want the page for. You can also do man -k keyword and get a list of manpages matching the key word. Its best just to try it out tho ;)
EDIT: just realised i should have given you a much simpler answer:
just run "man man"