Rigging is almost impossible to teach on a thread. Just too many things. One thing you will want to do is enable your "LRA" also known as "Local Rotation Axis." This is in your display options under the display column and transform display. This will show you the proper axis of your joints. There is a plugin known as comet joint orient that is very good as well at orienting them. As previously stated you can manipulate the joint orientations to mimic the rotation values and then zero out the rotation values and have the joint zeroed out but still in the same rotation since it is now within the orientation and not the rotation values. You can also use aim constraints to aim a parent to a child joint and use a locator as the up vector. Then you zero the child orientation out to have a parent/child chain that is oriented properly.