Also check out the first InDesign basics series I did, as well as the second one, a project walkthrough. Feel free to leave comments on any of those articles if you have questions. I’ll try to answer them for you! And never underestimate the power of Adobe LiveDocs for the programs. They do a really good job (unlike many other user’s manuals).

As for your particular question, you can use a text box on the master page (if you have several, link them on the master page). Then load your text into your cursor (Cmd/Ctrl + D and select your text file), hold Shift and click in the text frame. This method will add the number of pages necessary to fit all the text in the file. If you don’t like that, then you can create the text frames and just detach/override the master object in your layout pages with Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + Click.