Newbie question on use of Azure Repos

Hi,

I'm new to Azure DevOps and looking for some pointers on where to start my journey in terms of the materials I need to be reading/learning.  Apologies if this is in the wrong group feel free to advise of a better option.

I'm trying to get control of my application configuration, currently it consists of a few hundred JSON property files that are being managed manually.  I want to get things under much better control and ideally move towards an automated way of working.  The application configuration files come from the development team and can be modified and updated as they release new features or they can be subject to changes as we deploy the application to customers.  These changes can continue through life. 

Changes we make thus far have been done using basic file editors, sometimes with JSON formatting options - Notepad+ and visual studio code. This gives me two basic use cases;

1) to track the changes we make to the configuration and to deploy it to different environments

2) to compare/merge our changes to the new baselines provided by development

My start point is to get the JSON files into an Azure Repo as I think that is the most important stage.

So the question is how best to do that and what components do I start with, I'm assuming I'll be able to integrate any workflow we have around editing the files with git and to ideally look to trigger deployment based on the changes - some of the configuration files can be deployed using APIs.

I'm not expecting someone to give me the idiots guide response here to every step I need to take with the keyboard, rather direction to suitable reading materials and training materials would be much appreciated along with any advice/gotchas to avoid.  Hopefully, I've provided enough detail of the problem.

thanks in advance for any assistance.  

Ian