I really appreciate anyone's help but maybe to help me get my head out of the myst, could someone roughly tell me at at least how these displays work?

Appart from the easiest part which is to connect them to ą µC, how does it basically work like:
- connect it
- on power-up, initialize it (seems there's a bunch of parameters to send to the display)
- will it already light-up something (backlight or any dot on the screen?)
- prepare a bunch of data to actually define the caracters you will want to display in a LOOKUP table
- call-up and send this or that caracter to display
- does the display need to be refreshed every x time or is it a one-shot command that will suffice to have something displayed
....

When I mean "basics", I really mean it.... I have absolutely no clue how this little things work....