It's a game from the 90's, it presumes you've read the manual.

If you just want some advice for starting out, try beginning with something like this:

Initial Layout
Use the water tool to place some waterfalls on a hill (yes, you can do this) and then use the power tool to place hydro-electric dams on top. This gives you clean, cheap power. You can try to play without this exploit once you've learned a bit more about the game, but for now keep things simple. Now build some road networks for your fledgling city. Pay attention to the spacing shown above: streets are spaced either 9 or 12 tiles apart. You can go as low as 6 tiles apart or as high as 15 tiles apart, but make sure it's a multiple of three. Due the size of most common buildings and the way zones develop, spacing in multiples of three is the most efficient way to build. I also make one road connection with a neighbouring town.

Fill in some zoning. You want a lot of green (residential), a lot of yellow (industrial), and a little bit of blue (commercial) to start. Your zoning must be within 3 tiles of a road in order for it to develop, and you'll notice that all my zoning keeps to this format. I went with high density here, but both high and low density work. Put some power lines overhead to deliver power to each area.

You don't need to do it immediately, but I built a hospital, police station, fire department, and school. These buildings do not need road access, so place them in the inner pockets surrounded by your zoned areas.

City Budget
Open up the city budget and turn down the spending on police, fire, health, and education. Because your city is small, you don't need maximum spending. Do not lower transit spending. Revisit this regularly and increase the funding as your city grows. Talk to your advisors to get an idea if things are going well or poorly.

If you turn off disasters (probably makes sense for your first playthrough), you can turn your fire spending down to 0 since there will never be any fires. Your citizens will still complain if you don't have a fire station, so you do need to build one eventually. You just don't need to fund it.

One Year Later
I let the city run for one year. I put up a few extra power plants when I got a warning about low power, but otherwise you can see that the city has developed nicely. Now you want to pay attention to the RCI graph. This tells you what kind of zones are in high demand. In this case, I have high demand on residential (green) and low demand on commercial and industrial (blue and yellow).

I have two options here. The first option is to place more residential zoning and grow my city. However, this costs money and once you've spent your starting cash you won't be able to afford to expand as quickly as possible. The second option is to raise residential taxes. This will generate revenues but lower demand on residential. So long as the demand remains positive, however, the city will not suffer and you will enjoy extra revenue. Play around with your taxes to balance revenue and city growth.

Your goal is to get your city to be profitable (the city here is already turning a small profit). Getting started is actually the hardest part about SC2K, but once you've got some momentum your city can generate a lot of revenue and grow nicely.

Once you've got the basics down and can provide the four primary services while maintaining a balanced budget, you can experiment with other buildings and configurations. For instance, try building pumps to deliver water to your city, or see what happens if you build your residential areas further away from your industrial area.