ESP8266 Community Forum

I recently bought a nodemcu esp8266 microcontroller and I want to use it on my future projects because of its speed conpared to arduino counterparts. I lookes at the pin outs for the microcontroller and some pins have overlapping functions. Is there something I need to do to access a specific function of a pin? Are there any tips or stuff I need to know to start using this microcontroller? Thanks in advance!

I could make an attempt in describing it here, but our wiki has nice pictures as well as a lot of useful information, so I'll give you a link to it instead.

Please note that you can't use GPIO6..GPIO11