Fortunately, using LaTeX, you can focus on the content rather than the formatting of your thesis.
You can download bibtex items for articles, books, etc. In addition, many of the class options which are valid for report class are disallowed in thesis class: titlepage, notitlepage, twoside, twocolumn, landscape, legalpaper, a4paper, a5paper, b5paper, and executivepaper.
It is equivalent to no options at all, i. It worked great, but it might be a bit much for a beginner. Some of their finer points which might be of interest, and differences to the article class, can be found in this post.
By default, the case of the heading and its label aren't altered. Lists with generally recommended packages have already been linked by others, so I'll avoid repeating those here.
The second argument is the body of the dedication. Go little step by little step.
Writing a thesis in LaTeX 8. It replaces figures with a box of the size of the figure. Page numbering is something that isn't fully programmed in the thesis class macros. The first argument, the title, is optional. Page numbering in the automatically-generated prologue pages contents page, etc.