Everything is broken. What should I do next time to prevent this?

Question

Okay, I'm having a wonderful time with Arch. So far I've managed to:
a) Install it successfully
b) Setup irssi, wvdial, and fluxbox
c) Break just about every application beyond irssi, wvdial, and pacman
d) Try to fix the latter and in the process break X
e) Reboot to discover a kernel panic.
Clearly I didn't go about this entirely right. So, this time, I'd like suggestions on how get Arch working properly.
What I did was...
pacman -S wvdial
pacman -Sy
pacman -S sudo xorg fluxbox
All this stuff appeared to work fine. Then I tried to install lynx from extra, and got a number of errors in the vein of 'xextproto: /usr/include/X11/extensions/lbxopts.h: exists in filesystem.' Someone told me to use pacman -Sf rather than pacman -S, and lo and behold, the errors disappeared. Starting lynx, however, gave me 'error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.' This wasn't a great improvement. So I tried to just get my whole system up and running.
sudo pacman -S eterm tor rxvt-unicode thunar mousepad firefox thunderbird abiword gnumeric vlc drscheme gimp gqview gcalctool gucharmap xscreensaver comix conky ttf-ms-fonts freetype2 evince hwd
I have dialup, so I left this on overnight, came back, and tried to install those packages whose dependencies were done downloading (up through firefox.) Again, I got a number of 'exists in filesystem' errors, so I used -Sf. Ultimately, this resulted in me getting 'error while loading shared libraries: libexpat.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory' on about every application I had (even xterm broke!) I concluded the solution to this was to do a pacman -Syu. This eventually finished, and gave more 'exists in filesystem' complaints, so I once again tried my simple solution, pacman -Sfu. (Appropriately, "System: fuck you.") After that X returned a 'no screens' error, so I rebooted and discovered a kernel panic. Great fun.
So, basically, I learned that:
a) I did something wrong
b) pacman's -f flag is a bad thing and I shouldn't use it.
What should I try doing next time to not screw everything up horribly? It seems that pacman works a tad bit different than apt.

Answer 1

The very first thing you should do whenever you install your system is a full system update, as stonecrest said in fewer words.   Then you can go ahead and install new applications - the apps you installed probably depended on newer versions of packages (like openssl) that you hadn't yet upgraded.
Arch is a rolling-release; in general you have to make sure your system is uptodate before installing new apps.