Joomla Beginner looking for some help

Hi everyone,

I have used other CMS in the past mostly wordpress, but a current project that I am working on is requiring me to use joomla so I was hoping I could find some help in r/joomla.

I need to create a blog in Joomla which I assume will be pretty simple, but I was wondering if there are any extensions or tutorials that I should know about that will help me make this blog look awesome and be very easy to use.

As well I need to make an events calendar where upcoming event will be posted. I was thinking the calendar would be on the homepage of the site and when the end user clicks on an event on the calendar it will bring them to the web page that has more information for that event. Is there an extension that will do this?

My other idea was to have a page on the site that is one giant calendar that will have all the events on it. And when the user clicks on the event on the calendar it will bring them to a page explaining the event.

I was just hoping someone could show me where to find some great extensions or tutorials to figure out what I need to do.

For school I am building a website for an organization. It is my final assignment for a class so I really want to do a great job for two reasons I would love to make the organization owner ecstatic about their new website as well an A is always nice!

Thanks a lot.

Also anyone who helps me will get 1,000,000,000,000 karma from me :)

EDIT: I took a look at bobMitch suggestion which was easyblog. It looks like an awesome tool to have an I think that, that might be the root I am going to take. I Just would like to know of or see other comparable options if there are any. So if you use or have heard good things about an comparable service to easyblog please post a link. Or if you think that easyblog is 100% the way to go please just let me know why. I don't have a problem spending money if it is worth it.