Being that your site is so young, links are a must at this early stage. You might feel the effects of the new-ness sandbox (which many debate), but if you find yourself on the bottom of the rankings don't fret, it could be your domain age and nothing more.
That said, google says domain age is minimal as a ranking factor outside of 6 months to a year.
I would make sure your content is top notch, run it through the 22 questions posting that google put out and make sure it is of high quality. You can avoid this, and just scrape links and content, but you will not get very far in the long run as your site will be panda food.
Build good linking relationships. Don't run scrapebox, try to link wheel, all that gaming stuff, it may work in the short term, but if it goes bad it goes real bad. Go after links in your niche, put out good content that users will want to link to. Engage in social media, try to provide value to that social niche.
My biggest advice - outline the flow of your site, dont differ from it. Your site architecture is the biggest foot in the door you can create. If it flows well at 6-10 pages, and will flow well at 100 - 150, you know you have a good site architecture. Interlink things that make sense. This will help you in terms of decreasing your bounce rate AND keeping the bot's happy while eating your sites content.
In terms of continuing your education, make a google reader feed for seo news and stay up to date. I know an SEO who read about panda at launch and still thinks they have all the facts. Stay updated, keep your site looking natural, and you will rise to the top.
Also, build links whenever you want, just make sure its a quality link rather than just another one to the tally sheet.
Plus: do the basics (analytics, WMT, etc.) Hope this helps
