Ships & Modules

You should probably start training shield skills and then go read the descriptions for all those shops and doa little research on your own first.

you should read the ship descriptions that are ingame. also, you dont need to train nighthawk if your main goal is a paper thin blops.

You're in a game for quite some time now, so I don't understand from where your questions are coming as they seem pretty basic. Also - you're in a pc corp. If your current corp doesn't help newbies - change it imo. There needs to be no drama - you need a bit of catering and they don't seem to provide it.

As for your question: there's numerous stuff you can do in game in regards to frigate pvp. I play for 6 months now and I still can use only missile boats, because this is what you should do - specialize.

In huge generalization when it come to frigates - every race has a rook ship, ewar ship, fast ship and 2x combat ships. For caldari: kestrel and merlin are combat ships and can brawl (there are kiting fits ofc), condor is design to be fast so it's a kiter (but you can somehow turn him into brawler - I think you need expensive implants for that tough), griffin is jaming so it's a ewar ship, and bantam is a logistic boat.

Every race also has long and short range weapon variants (again - it's a generalization). In missiles - rockets are short range and light missiles are long range. In hybrids - rails are long range, blasters are short range.

Every weapon system has sizes. Usualy they are called small/medium/large but in missiles there's a bit of a difference: (rockets/light missiles) / (heavy assault missiles/heavy missiles) / (torpedos/cruise missiles) [I might have confused the large missile systems but it's still not relevant to you).

This should answer most of your question regarding what is what. You should check for yourself in attributes tab what ranges and sizes weapons have. You put small on frigates, medium on cruisers, and large on battleships.

With this info and a program called EVE fitting tool you do the following: chose a ship, chose short/long weapon variant, put some tank/speed modules on it, look at EFT and check if it makes sense, test the ship.

This info is very basic, but you seriously need to read yourself or count on other people explaining things to you. People been playing this game for 10 yrs. Do not reinvent the wheel.

edit:
If you won't read on it or be guided by corp prepare to be slaughtered. Literally. And do not move past t1 frigs (hawk is not cheap) before you have some clue on how things work.