This page provides links to some tutorials developed by the UCLA Electrical Engineering Department, under Prof. William Kaiser, to help you set up an Edison system and perform some of the basic software and networking functions required to use it effectively.
Not all of these tutorials will necessarily be relevant to your project, but you should probably at least take a look at all of them.
Tutorial 2: Linux and the Edison
Tutorial 3: Introduction to OPKG
Tutorial 5: GPIO, Interrupts, and I2C Interfaces
Tutorial 6: SPI, PWM and more GPIO
Tutorial 7: TCP Socket Communications
Tutorial 9: Timing Analysis and Synchronization