There are a number of Vim totorials on the internet. Google for "Vim Tutorial". Oddly enough, I have to recommend that you avoid the one on the "vi-improved.org" site because it's too advanced and also not that well written.
There is a very good book, not too expensive, ISBN 0735710015.
It is not required that you use vim in this course,
which is one reason I don't use lecture time to cover it. However, it
is a very good editor for programs, and I'm prepared to give you the
tools you'll need to become competent quickly, which will serve you
well whenever you need to write programs in the future.
To get full value from vim, you should use a reference
card like the one here, and mark the commands you've heard
about and practiced, and to see which ones look interesting that you
might want to look up in a larger reference. And thinking of
references, don't forget vim's own internal documentation, accessed
through the :help command (don't forget that it starts
with a colon ":").
For the vim task in the first lab, download this
rc file to help with
the style rules. Rename it to ".vimrc" in your
Unix/Linux home directory, where it will be hidden (because of the dot)
and vim will read it every time it starts.