beginner with amps here, what do I do for distortion, delays, etc...?

Basically what the other guy said but the other way around - if its a beginner practice amp then it probably has fx built in which you can get by playing around with the settings. If you have a good amp (they tend not to bother with fx as your amp gets better - most musicians using good amplifiers know what fx they want and have pedals instead. alot of amps still have a distortion channel though so you still get distortion) or you want to use fx at band practice or playing gigs then you'll want to invest in some pedals. If you have an amp with fx using them live is just a pain to be honest.

If you go down the pedal route then for delays; there's some good delays around at the minute, the boss dd-3 is a good one, the boss dd-6 is better but costs more. There's the Electro Harmonix memory man which has some cool features. Theres analogue delays if you want good sounding ones, mxr make a nice one. Line 6 dl-4 is used by alot of pro-musicians and has loads of settings to mess around

Distortion there's an aweful lot of choice around. If you have a tube amp then the amp distortion is probably better than any pedal you're going to get. If not then boss make a big range of them for all different kinds of tone. Digitech make some good ones too. Germanium Transistor Fuzz Faces sound nice and there's loads of copys of those available quite cheap. Zvex make some of the nices but they're a little more pricy. There's loads so try as many out as you can.

Chorus wise i'm not sure of what to recommend. Boss make a fairly standard one, ibanez do an alright one. Personally i use a really old pearl one, and have a chorus mode on my whammy pedal too.

There's loads of other fx too...wah wahs are fun, pitch shifters (like the digitech whammy) are also fun, you can get pedals to make the guitar sound like a synth.

You can get multi-fx pedals which do loads of different type of pedals in one. Some people prefer these because you just have one box to control everything. Personally i avoid them because individual pedals tend to sound better and have more flexability.

If you are just beginning then the best first step is to buy a multi-effects pedal by DOD, ZOOM or BOSS, one with a wah, compression, distortion, chorus, flanger etc.

The ZOOM G1X is only $79 from Zzounds.com (on-line) and has everything you need to get an idea about what the different effects sound like. The DigiTech RP-90 is even better and just a bit more money. Look them up.

well usually they have setting knobs but if its a crappy amp without those you may need to get guitar pedals from like sam ash or guitar center