If you can't get it working correctly, the best path is to contact tech support and get some official help. You'll find the support form on your registered user pages.

Looks like your effect is set up to "Percent of View Width" instead of map units or percent of drawing extents width. Go in and edit the effect in question, and change this section. Do note that you may need to tweak the size of the effect after doing this, as you basically change the baseline for the sizing.

Note that as with any effect, Edge Fade doesn't work on a per entity basis. What it does is to find areas with a solid fill (i.e.) same color and fades the edge of those areas. This is basically usless to do if your entities have bitmap fills. In other words, this effects is mainly only usefull on a sheet where all the entities have fill style Solid.

I don't have the actual setup for that myself, so I don't know exactly where the links are supposed to lead, but you should find all the pdf's inside your CC3+ data directory (The directory you chose during installation, default is c:\ProgramData\ProFantasy\CC3plus). Most of the guides are sourced from annual material, so they'll probably reside inside the Annual subfolder, while I guess the compendium itself is probably in the Documentation subfolder.

Note that since you say "start learning", if you're not familiar with CC3+ at all, the best place to start is with the manual, which also contain many tutorials. You can access this from the help menu.

Change house layer should be able to be used at any time (in a city map). But it is only useful if you wish to use the demographics coloring of buildings in CD3, apart from that, it isn't really that helpful.

For the step by step:

1. Activate change house layer from the city meny
2. Select the buildings to change layer for (Finish selection with right click -> Do it as usual)
3. CC3+ now prompts you for the layer. You can type it in, but the easiest is to right click to bring up the dialog, pick the desired layer, and click ok.
4. All done