Traditional menu link/button to page content hierarchy

After spending several days going through the documentation, I still haven't found a way to create a traditional set of menu links/buttons linking to known or predefined web content. The downloadable "getting-started_2.pdf" doesn't indicate that this can be done, however, information of "Views" alludes to the ability to program menu links/buttons that can navigate to pages with expected node content. This capability is important for corporate and product brochure type websites and I've seen example Drupal sites that emulate this. The documentation should be clearer about how to do this since this is probably what half of the users would like to do with this CMS. I understand that there are several Views modules that can be added to do this, but I don't know which is the best. This seems like it should be a core module.