No Beginners Luck

So, I am very new to this whole modding Doom thing, I only started this mid summer, and I was going through the tutorials and one of tutorials, "Editors & Tools to start with" had a DECORATer tap, I saw the DecX 2 and how it was meant to help out with coding for actors. I am doing my own monster with rather complex attacks but am having troubles and was hoping DecX would help me in someway. I have been using Slade3 for a good while and know my way around it. And since I am really knew to this, I was curious if I should seek out DecX 2 (it would be nice if anyone knew where I could get it because the link is dead and I can't seem to find it on my own) or if DecX is not really any different than Slade3.

And I can't seem to find a good program to edit sprites other than Window's default Paint. If there is any suggestions for different programs, it would be very useful.

Thanks guys. If anyone has any tips for beginners, that would be greatly appreciated.

Well, I got started by a combination of two different approaches:
1) Making real simple monsters (such as Zombiemen mods) to get a hang of the basic syntax and structure of an actor, and
2) Reverse-engineering monsters other people made to learn how to pull off the more complex behaviors. Basically, finding something sophisticated, and changing stuff until I learned exactly what made it "work", so I knew how to replicate that behavior on my own, and how to adjust it for my own preferences. (Finally figuring out how the ZSpecOps worked made me feel like I just leveled up in real life.)

Just remember--there's no shame in learning through other people's examples, especially if they have made something that's very similar to what you want to achieve. That can be a lot more effective than trial-and-error if you're still very new. Just be careful not to completely rip anybody off--if you wind up borrowing large chunks of code without performing significant modifications, give credit to whoever originally wrote it. Once you're confident enough to write code from scratch, you don't usually need to credit other people just for having similar ideas (though you can if you want to).

And I just use SLADE3. I don't have any familiarity with DecX 2 at all, so I can't state an opinion about it one way or the other.

As for image editing programs, I think a lot of people use GIMP since it's free and has a lot of functionality that Paint doesn't have, including the ability to support layers (which is great when you're trying to composite multiple sprites together). I'm lucky enough to actually have Photoshop, albeit an old version, though Photoshop isn't the best for palette-based graphics (it can do the job, though).