Doing Textures by means of Materials Question, and a NURBS question.

I am using Blender 2.72, and am finding applying textures a little confusing.
I have pi menus enabled and working.

I can't find where you go to generate a Texture index, since I can't find the "Link and Materials"
Sub Menu. I have started by creating myself a new Material, to correspond to my face, and have given that
a pass index of 1.

I can't find the "Links and PipeLine" area.

-For my surface, how do I set up a Material for a face, have that take
a Texture, and have it all work for rendering?
The tutorials are for previous versions of Blender, and I don't know
what I have to do to have everything linked and allocated as required.

-I can construct an internally curved surface by going <add NURBS Surface>,
and constructing everything from connections of those. But I can't get Blender
to auto fill a curved Nurbs surface (in 3D and not flat 2D) say,
within a cyclic Bezier curve loop. Without working from a Nurbs Surface object,
and by use of filling, is there an auto way to do this?

-If not, is it on the way? Or in one of the free add ons?

to apply a texture to that face (or faces that have this material u set up) u have to assign that material to that face first (i guess u did that),
then u should make sure that u unwraped your face(s) in some way..whatever u feel right for the given purpose.

If u want to add the texture in the material tab (the simple way) u can just click the lil dot next to the color of the material (lets say its a diffuse shader) and select image texture from the dropdown. it should then automaticly create a simple node setup for you with an image texture wich is the input of a diffuse shader wich then plugs into the surface socket of the material output.
You could also do this manually in the node editor, lots of people just use the node editor to achieve all sorts of results with textures..like mapping em to some sort of roughness factor value and the like. Also the node editor should have all sort of index I/O's to do all the fancy pass stuff.
As far as i know pie menus do not influence the basic structure of how node editing works, so dont worry or just turn off the pie menues again for the time being.