New to Debian (Gentoo user) - package management

[Tanstaafl <tanstaafl@libertytrek.org>]

Hello all,

I have some questions about how to do certain maintenance tasks in 
Debian that I do routinely in gentoo.

I've read man apt-get, but didn't find answers to these questions. What 
I'm looking for is the equivalent commands in debian to achieve the same 
things.

In gentoo, I routinely perform pretend updates to see what updates are 
available, so a process like:

eix-sync
to synchronizes the local repo with the online one

eix packagename
shows all available versions of that package, and what repo they reside 
in (stable, testing, etc)

emerge --pretend -vuDN world
results in a list of all available updates, as well as any dependencies 
that would be installed, which I can then pick and choose from. I 
usually wait until newly available updates have been available for at 
least a few days before installing them, to avoid nasty surprises.

Is there a decent manual describing basic maintenance tasks like this?

Thanks