It is unfortunate for you the since Maya 8.0 the menus have been changed and of course unless a tutorial is brand spanking new it will not feature Maya 2008.
All is not lost though as all of the tools are still available in Maya if not is exactly the same place but if you hit F1 on your keyboard you can type the tool in the search of the help documents and find out where it is.

The basic menu changes were as follows:

The Modeling menu set was split into two and became Polygons for Polygon modeling and Surfaces for Nurbs modeling.

Polygon became Mesh
Edit Polygon became Edit Mesh

As far as the extra lines on the plane that is just a creation option and if you click on the little box next to create plane you can specify how many slits in each direction and how large the plane should be before creation or you can simply adjust the values in the chanel box to the right of the screen after the creation but before modifying the geometry.

Hope this clears things up a little for you .