Yes. You should deffinently learn all there is to know about hypershape if you're going into texturing soon. For instance, as you said, you can assign textures to objects by right-clicking and choosing materials>assign new material. Well, let's say you have 100 boxes in a scene that you want to have a checker texture. You could go to each and every box and right-click>materials>blah,blah,blah and adjust the attributes window for every box, but hypershade makes it 1000 times easier. If you open hypershade, you can create any shader you want and add anything you want to that shader. In this case, you would open hypershade and click a lambert material over in the box on the left. As you can see, a lambert appears on the bottom section of hypershade. Double click it and assign a checker texture to it by clicking the checkered box to the right of the colour slider. Select all 100 of your boxes, then in the top section of hypershade right click the checkered lambert shader and choose assign material to selection. It's better to have 1 checker lambert assigned to 100 boxes rather than 100 checker lamberts assigned individually to 100 boxes. See? This is the purpose of the grand exalted hypershade.