Take a deep breath... Relax...
The WugFresh Toolkit is one of the best. If you use Win8 as your regular machine, then that's where you want to install the Toolkit. I use Win8. Just follow the instructions for driver setup. You'll need the drivers anyway, even if it's just to transfer files over USB.
Let WugFresh help you through the setup.
Once that's done you can unlock and root. The toolkit makes it easy.
Then, fork over the change for the paid version of franco.Kernel Updater. Save your stock kernel before you change anything and you can always restore it. Milestone 3 is out now. The Updater will flash the kernel for you and reboot. There are a lot of preconfigured setups you can run if you don't want to customize your own settings. Again, franco is one of the best.
These tools made it easy for me and I've just come back to Android after a long absence.
If you have problems or questions along the way, someone here should be able to help you.
If it goes horribly wrong somehow, you can restore to factory pretty easily: either use the Nexus Root Toolkit or follow the directions here -
http://forums.androidcentral.com/nex...e-restore.html