Some basic workflow questions

[Altera_Forum]

I am trying to understand the command line tools and I was hoping someone could help me out with the design flow. I'm used to Xilinx tools and just started learning Altera. 

 What I gather from "Introduction to Quartus II Software" and playing around a bit is first you run quartus_map, and that produces a ton of files, but the important one is the .cdb. Is that correct or are there other important files? I saw many temporary files.  Quartus_fit then generates... something? Does it just rearrange the .cdb file? It seems to generate dozens of temporary files as well.  Quartus_asm then takes something (.cdb?) and produces .pof and .sof  Does quartus_pgm just program directly from the .pof and .sof files? Or does it make a .rbf file first?  As far as what the file extensions mean I found a very helpful link [oops I can't post links yet] but I've seen a few extensions that aren't defined. For instance, what is a .pdb?  Thanks!

[Altera_Forum]

Unlike X, you don't output a file at each module to be input to the next. Consider the /db a black-box where everything is stored and you don't need to peek behind the curtain. (There are pros and cons to both, but users are successful with both methods...)

[Altera_Forum]

I must say it is an effective post to read. I was very needy for such type of information and i got on this forum. This is the experimented information.

[Altera_Forum]

Look at the .flow.rpt for the commands run when compiling in the GUI(quartus_map, quartus_fit, etc.) and you can get a sense of the flow if you wanted to script it.