Yea, a launchpad is a bit rough for dropping you in blind. The idea that you might have to turn on the clock for a bank of IO before using them is not something a novice is going to realize they need to do on their own without considerable trouble.
There is a series of books (I used an older edition when I took my first micro-controller class) by Valvano that uses the Launchpad product as the teaching example and covers just about anything you might want to do with it.