Some Youtube-Channels I can recommend, but with varying levels of “noob”-friedlieness. Just watch a few and decide for yourself which can help the most:
https://youtube.com/@christianlempa
https://youtube.com/@TechnoTim
https://youtube.com/@LearnLinuxTV
As for a reverse proxy, it depends how you want to access your services. If you’re just gonna host your services on docker and then publish ports on the host you can just access them that way. But that way they are of course not encrypted, which in your home LAN can be fine. To really use a reverse proxy you also need to have a way to rewrite or add dns entries in your local network. All the domains and subdomains you’d want to use must point to the reverse proxy which would then forward the requests to the services.
The way I have it configured right now is that I have a reverse proxy on my docker host which has the ports 443 and 80 published on the host, while all the services I use in docker on that host do not have published ports. They’re all then in a network with the reverse proxy so it can forward the requests to the services. That way I can encrypt everything with SSL/TLS and have trusted certificates on everything. I use nginx proxy manager which also handles my certificates.
The really vulnerable open ports are the ones you forward to your router. But you only need those when you want to access services from outside your network. But I would wait on that until you feel comfortable.