Ok now for your second question, to have a reference image within a view. Go to the View menu of that view panel, go down to Image Plane> Import Image. Choose your image that you'd like to use as reference, hit OK. And the image will be placed in that view.

Your third question about hair. Honestly I would hold off on playing around with this until you've played around with the other aspects of Maya. However, if you feel you are ready to mess around with hair, then I'm not going to stop you. Maya's Fur is a lot to get into, and most of the time, pretty much 99.98% (ok maybe I'm exagerating here ), the default result will not be what you are looking for. When you place Fur/Hair on an object, it will cover the whole object, you have to go in and adjust it so that it is only in the area you want it to be. You can do this with the Paint Fur Attribute Tool, and adjusting the Baldness of the object that has Fur applied to it. There are a ton of other attributes that are apart of using Fur, so you can have the exact look you wanted for the hair. The problem is that it is a lot of tweaking and adjusting to make sure you have the proper results. I would definitely look for some tutorials for this as well, maybe even check out what Alias has or even the help docs that came with Maya. I'm still trying to figure out how to use hair myself, so these are primarily just suggestions to base your decisions off of.

Anyways, I hope that all this helped out at least somewhat. Good luck with your projects.