Hi, Skin, and welcome to Media Center. For someone new to ripping it can seem like a daunting task. However, MC makes it quite easy. I'll try to give you some quick pointers and some things to think about.
It is easiest to get started by going to Tools > Options in MC. Once you get to the Options window, I will walk you through a few steps. Use the bolded items below to go through the options.
CD & DVD: Under CD ripping I set copy mode to secure. This rereads the CD up to 16 times in order to ensure an accurate rip. This is the essentially the same as use EAC to rip your music. Under AutoPlay you can set Audio CD for Rip. This way it will start ripping every time you put a CD in the drive. I leave the other settings at their defaults, but you can look through them to get an idea of what they do. Under Rip Complete Options you will see that it will attempt to automatically retrieve cover art for your CD after the rip is done.
To Think About: You can rip the CD to individual files or as one file with a cue file. The option for setting this is under File Management. The cue file provides the track information that is contained on the single file so that each song still shows up separately within MC. Some that rip classical music like to use this method because sometimes there is silence before the first track that will only be captured using the single file/cue method. I don't think it is necessary, but you can google for more info.
Encoding: Here you will set what type of encoding you want to use. I use Monkey's Audio (APE) which is a lossless format. It is a little more efficient than FLAC. You can choose the FLAC decoder, though. I would leave the decoder settings to their defaults. MC can also play the FLAC files you have already ripped with EAC.
To Think About: Determine which lossless codec you want. Note that this doesn't have anything to do with supported formats for portable devices because MC can transcode on the fly to another format when copying to a portable device.
File Location: Set the folder location you want to use for ripping your music. I use d:\Music for all my music and d:\Movies for all movies. I leave the folder name and file name rules at their defaults.
To Think About: Some spend a lot of time thinking through their file structure. You really don't need to do that with MC and you can easily change it later using the Library Tools. Unlike some programs, with MC your file structure has nothing to do with how you display and sort your music library.
I would suggest you get started ripping the music and do any additional tagging later. You may find that the tags provided by the database lookup that MC does is good enough for you. However, you may also want to use a more complex tagging system. For example, you could list all the instruments used in each piece or you could list the featured instrument.
Here is a
Discussion: Classical Music thread to get you started on thinking about tagging. You can search for more threads on the topic, too.