Need help with node editor

So I’m new to blender, call me a noob or what you will. This question may seem benign but its bothering the heck out of me. Any help is greatly appreciated.

So Ive taken to watching the blender guru beginner videos on youtube to learn the basics of blender and what not. Every morning I go into blender and remake the scene to get practice and memorization of the functions of blender. I keep running into the same problem when I go to apply a material to the objects on the screen. Ill hit material and head over to the node editor and the layout is different than what I was looking for. I have a material box and just an output box. Not a material output box, so I cant add a shader of any kind and when I go to change the color of the items they change the color of the item in the 3D viewport which isn’t what I’m looking to do at all.

Please help its frustrating me like crazy, I left the program open last night and came back to it this morning and it allowed me to create a material output and do the whole shader thing but I don’t know what was changed to allow that to happen. Thank you for any help!

By default the render engine is set to ‘Blender Render’, I suspect the tutorial you are looking at does not use this renderer but the ‘Cycles Render’ engine. Each renderer has their own independent material system. You can change the render engine at the top of the blender interface
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/index.html

thank you so fricking much, brothering the heck out of me.

In cycles you need to set the node tree type to Shader in the bottom left and change the shader type to Object.