Now, to make my questions have more value, a little history:
The first time I used Linux was within a virtual machine, and I knew nothing of LInux. It was some distro that uses KDE. I thought it was cool that there was another type of OS, but I didn't care for it to much. About a month ago I heard talking of Linux, and that stirred up my tinkering with it(XP has always been annoying to me, but still better that Mac). I downloaded about 15 distros that looked appealing to me, and the first one I fired up was Geubuntu. I loved it, and knew that Linux was going to be my OS. I thought Geubuntu was going to be on my computer forever, until I started running into problems. What drew me in so much was Enlightenment, I loved the taskbar(well, the equivalence of it to Windows, not sure what you call it on Linux), the speed, and the eye candy. While using Geubuntu, and while searching for a new distro, I was learning as much about the Linux world as I could. Now I'm using Mint, and I'm quite happy with it, but, GNOME doesn't seem as spectacular as Enlightenment did to me. So, I downloaded Enlightenment, but ran into annoyances.
I know Mint uses GNOME as the default DE, along with Metacity for the WM, and Nautilus as the FM. What I'm trying to learn now is the difference, and how to change desktop environments, windows managers, and file managers. This is what I understand to be the differences:
DE- It provides the applications within your OS, such as the media players, administration panels, etc. Also makes the icons on your desktop
WM- It is responsible for how everything is displayed on the screen, and virtual windows and such.
FM- Controls the navigation between files.
First question is, is Enlightenment "desktop shell", halfway between a DE and a WM because it's a DE without it's own applications to fill in? That's what I've come to as my own conclusion for now.
Second, can Enlightenment have it's file manager switched? I absolutely HATE the file manager(or, what I explained above to be what I think of as the file manager), and I like Nautilus, what I have on Mint when using GNOME. The plain windows with no options in Enlightenment make it unusable to me.
Third, I am an intermiediate computer programmer, I created and manage an online game called Saggy Wars(http://www.saggy-wars.com), I know PHP, MySQL, CSS, some Java and C++, and bits of JavaScript and XML. By this time next year I will be in college classes building my C++ skills, and I'm just about to finish up a wimpy introduction class to it in high school. I want to build things for Linux, at first some applications, but eventually I think I want to build my own WM. Are there any guides to this, or just general information on building things for Linux?
Sorry for all the writing, I got a little excited once I started typing about this stuff.
I started reading some of it. Since I'm using this thread for questions, how do I use this: 
