basic maintenance

I bought a book by david pogue on mac os x, since my mac didn't come with a manual. I was trying to find something about basic/routine maintenance for my machine, but couldn't. Is there some feature in OS X to 'clean up' the machine from any unnecuessary programs/things that might slow it down? I get the feeling mine isn't as fast as it could be (some programs seem to open up slowly, etc), unless I just didn't notice it before.

You can verify and repair permissions from Disk Utility, also some other maintenance operations, but the top app for maintenance is Onyx from Titanium. It's free, and it does a superb job.