Header Background Image

Hey all, I’m a new wordpress user, and I’m trying to make a basic blog. I have a jpeg that I want to put as a backgrond image for the header. I also want to change the background image for the entire site. In addition, I also want to put a tall image to each side of the blog.

I’m a CS major, and I’ve done a good deal of web development using XHTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP/MySQL/etc, however I’ve never used things like wordpress where most of the work is already done for you, so I really have no clue how to approach it.

Here’s the site I’m working on:

Thanks in advance ??