I am very new to Salesforce but I am an experienced developer and understand the principles involved.  I inherited Salesforce dev and admin when the only person at my company who knew anything about it left abruptly, so I am trying to figure it out as quickly as I can. 

I am looking for a recommendation for a tutorial or course, etc. on how to create and test and debug triggers. 
I have managed to set up Eclipse to connect to my Salesforce sandbox, and I have also found how to create & modify triggers in the developer console. 
I have not figured out how to enable any kind of intellisense (if this even exists), step through the trigger code to debug and see what is happening with the objects in the code during execution, or even how to test a trigger other than deploying it and perfoming the action that should activate the trigger.

I have found some very basic tutorials about simple triggers, but nothing on how to set up the Eclipse environment, debug, test, etc. or how to access object hierarchys or database query data inside a trigger. 
If anyone can recommend something for me to watch or a course to attend or anything short of hiring a private consultant/tutor that would be appreciated. 

Thanks