I honestly know nothing about F2P's or MMO's, any basics I should know or any place I can read up?

Every MMO is diffrent although they may have some similarites they are few and far between.

There are some good posts here about the differences between Pay to Play (subscription based) and Free to Play MMO's http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1427353-what-would-be-your-preferred-payment-model/

To find out more about MMO's in general I would suggest just google Massive Multiplayer Online Games or just MMO's and start reading

In the link I provided I have posted about a few of the F2P MMO's that you can play now and one way to find out about this stuff would be to go try them, after all ESO is not going to release until probably November 2013 at the earliest so now is a good time to go check things like that out.

Personally I much prefer the Pay to Play model because that usually means the MMO has a healthy amount of players playing it and it is not scrambling to stay in business.

Another really good site for information on ESO is the Tamriel Foundry http://tamrielfoundry.com/forums/