JW’s here to help you learn how to fly your craft in an efficient manner. If you already know the basics you can head over to his playlist full of guides and articles which I have spent the past year working on to help players become more competitive. Practicing in the public universe is a valid option, however Arena Commander provides a more controlled environment where you can practice the basics without the worry of crashing your ship.
To start off, understanding the key bindings is essential, and I have a separate video that dives deeper into the specifics. To summarise, I like to map my strafes to WSAD as I believe strafes are the most important element when it comes to movement. When that is done, we can start talking about speed limiter. Generally in combat you want the speed limiter off, as it limits both the top speed of your ship and maximum output of your engines. For practising and learning skills, you should have it enabled.
We also need to know about coupled and decoupled modes. When in coupled mode, your ship will stop when you let go of inputs, but in decoupled your ship will keep going in the current direction. It is important to learn both, as they are both useful tools. Moving on to movement, you will need to understand the vector; this is signalled by two chevrons and will point to the direction the ship is going in. Additionally, you can use the TVI radar which is a compass with a red dot in the middle to indicate your ship and a white dot to indicate the TVI. Finally you can break in two ways; either by using spacebreak or learning how to stop the ship yourself. With time and practice you will be able to understand the 3D space better and fly more efficiently.