First off, there aren't really any "stupid" questions if you're honestly trying to learn something. Part of learning is asking questions, considering the answers and figuring out what you still don't know/need to learn.

The responses you've received are pretty much the equivalent of grad school/Masters Degree learning combined with the even more invaluable teacher called experience. IOW, you just received the equivalent of a book that people would buy for the useful information it contains. Yes, this means we have some extremely knowledgeable people on this website and many of them posted above in response to your question.

Something else that may help you is some ballistics information to store as a bookmark or even download as a pdf file. Here's just one at a website run by Chuck Hawks.

http://www.chuckhawks.com/rifle_ballistics_table.htm


And last, but not least, I don't think you could go wrong with either caliber for deer hunting. If you decide to hunt moose or grizzly bear, the 30-06 does have a little heavier bullet selection so you're already on the right track.