tar is like the zip for Linux.
It has just too many options / parameters. You need to know 2 combinations, one to create an archive and the other to extract files from an archive. If you want to learn more about tar, well, this is not the place for this. But stay here and learn more useful things instead 🙂
Create an archive
tar -pczf myNewArchive.tgz /some/directory/to/archiveExtract files from an archive
tar -xzf someArchive.tar.gzIt’s that easy 🙂