Do read up on aperture and shutter and use A and Tv mode because the camera does the metering for you. The two mode allows you to set the depth of field to isolate your subject from the background(A mode) and the dragging the shutter or making it faster allows for very creative execution of photo, such as trails of fireworks, freezing water droplets, jump shots and even car trails left by lights. (tv mode)
some tricks i learnt is to set a min. aperture or min. shutter to avoid handshake and out of focus problems. i.e. 1/50 minimum to avoid handshake when shooting at 50mm, or f4/5.6 when taking a large group close up so their faces will be in focus. If your images are still underexposed, you can increase ISO but bear in mind the noise in the photos you introduce.
The advantage as mentioned is that when you set the priority for aperture, the camera calculates the complementing shutter speed to get a "proper" exposure. It is difficult to jump to manual because you choose the exposure settings all by yourself.
After you are comfortable with shooting in these modes, you will realize that even the camera is not smart enough to determine the best exposure for you, and that is when metering modes come in.
Once you are comfortable with the following, you may proceed on to manual mode which allows you better control
If the terms sound foreign to you, please google and read up more on the basic terms