In general, you're going to want to be familiar with where the documentation for Fedora is (assuming you're not using Redhat Enterprise Linux, which you or your company would have paid for). In particular, package management is probably what you'll want to take a look at.
What is Package Management?
Package management basically refers to installing software in a manner that makes it organized and facilitates upgrades as well as clean removal of unwanted software (as opposed to running make install
with source tarballs, which leave you needing to manually organize your sources if you want any hope for handling upgrades or removal). A package (in the Redhat world, these are .rpm files) essentially contains either the source code or precompiled program you want to install, as well as instructions for installing it, as well as logging what took place so that later changes can be made. The package management system keeps track of what is installed and where to facilitate its core role.
Which Version of Redhat am I running?
As for how to determine which version you're running,
cat /etc/issue
and/or
cat /etc/redhat-release
entered at a shell prompt should give you your answer.