When setting up your food stockpile use multiple stockpiles and only allow barrels on one for your booze stockpile, then have the other with barrels disabled for everything else. This keeps all of your barrels free for booze storage, which is very important.
Even better, on the 'p' menu where you're choosing which stockpiles to place... hit * (on the numpad) a few times. This will increase the number of 'reserve barrels' you have. This means they're reserved for any task that specifically uses barrels, such as brewing alcohol. They will not be used for general food storage. This way, unless you're totally out of barrels because you were using all but your 5 reserved barrels and then build 5 asheries/dyer workshops, you'll have some barrels for emergency booze production.
Without having to remember to tweak every single food/seed stockpile.
Goblinite is the fan term for "those damn goblins left 500 pieces of useless narrow iron armor wrapped around their stinking corpses, so I'm going to melt it down for the iron"
The easiest way to irrigate for your first farm: Dig a big room next to a murky pool (the room is underground, of course, and should be at least 6 times the area of the pool, if you don't want your hallway to get muddy). Once the room is dug, merely mine away one wall tile that's separating your room from the murky pool. In a minute or so, everything will be under 1/7 water, and you can start building those farms. Just go ahead and build a wall (b-C-w) in the gap. Building destroyers won't be able to touch it (and unless you're in a hot area, it should be underwater soon anyway).
d-b-d. Learn it, use it, love it. This is how you designate lots of stuff for dumping all at once. There's something called the 'quantum stockpile' that you'll hear people talking about. Designate a garbage dump (it's a zone -- 'i') that's just 1 tile big. Everything marked for dumping will (eventually) end up there. By everything, I mean
everything. There's no limit to the number of objects that can be stored there. You can out mass black holes if you want.
Speaking of quantum stockpiles... if you want to permanently remove stuff from the game (say, those 20,000 loose stones I mentioned earlier), then you can build a drawbridge (b-g), hook it to a lever, raise the drawbridge, place a garbage zone under the drawbridge, store rocks (or elves, or whatever) under said drawbridge by dumping them. Low the drawbridge. Everything under it was just smashed out of existence. This is referred to as the dwarven atom-smasher.
Speaking of Elves... They bring lots of really neat toys (read: Giant Lions, Tigermen, and other assorted awesome animals), but only if they don't like you. You see, cloth is far more profitable from a weight-to-value ratio, so if you keep giving them good profits, they'll just bring acre after acre of useless cloth. To solve this problem, don't pay for anything. Just mark what you want and seize it. They'll keep bringing the nice animals, and a minimum of cloth. Sure,
eventually they'll get ticked enough to siege you (maybe), but you'll have at least a decade of favorable (to you) trade relations first. Similarly, don't give in to their unfair demands that you stop harvesting
bed charcoal wood.
Speaking of trade caravans... If you need to equip an army in the near future and don't have a decent supply of steel yet, wait until the dwarven traders get there, trade for the steel weapons and armor. If it's not enough, then 'v' the dwarven guards and mark their gear for dumping. Assuming you have enough free labor, your dwarves will come and steal the armor right off those guards. This does, however, get charged against you when they run their balance sheets back home, so unless you want them annoyed with you, don't do this too often, or grossly overcompensate them in regular trading. Also, if you want more steel, and they just aren't bringing enough bars/ore (you are ordering steel, iron, and pig iron bars, right?), then buy out all the steel and iron toys they have and melt them down. It's not much, but every little bit helps.
Lastly:
Dwarf Therapist. I don't think I could play the game without it. If offers a much needed streamlined interface for managing your dwarven labors.