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FIPS County Codes:  Most Census data uses filenames based on the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) codes as published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. You can refer to the county codes at the NIST website.  There are also other FIPS codes (besides counties).

MSA's: The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) defines Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) as a group of counties that encompass the metro area.  To determine which counties make up a metro area during a particular census, the Census web site has MSA listings showing the metro areas that were in effect for past decennial censuses back to 1950.  (They also have the most recent (post-2000) lists of MSAs and related areas at the Census web site, along with policy documents relating to the definitions.)

Key to Filenames: Included in a zip file from ESRI's Geography Network is a key to the filenames of the TIGER layers, to help you remember what you downloaded.

Census Feature Class Codes (CFCC's) are used in coding features within some layers, such as the various categories of streets, roads, highways, and freeways in street or road layers. Knowing the meaning of these codes can help in selecting or clearly displaying features in a layer.  List from ESRI.  Complete documentation from Census (CFCC's begin on page 3-25, or p.77 of the Acrobat document)

Land Use - Land Cover (LULC) Codes  You will need to join a dBase file to a downloaded LULC layer's attribute table in order to match English words to the numeric LULC classification codes.  (Field LUCODE in the attribute table matches to LU2-CODE in the dBase file.)  These files can be downloaded from WebGIS