How do you get a rating? Sorry if it's a dumb question.

I recently joined so I'm a beginner here, and I've been spending my time doing puzzles and playing the computer. With my schedule, playing a member here will be a bit tough, but I'm curious, how do you get a rating? I see people talking about getting stuck in their rating or how to improve it, but how do you develop a rating in the first place? 

I tried the search function but it didn't help. 

You need to play against human players to get a rating (your 1200 is an arbitrary srarting point). If your schedule is tight perhaps daily chess would be the solution, where you have several days to make each move. 

So games against the computer or puzzles don't count towards the rating, then?

Games against the computer don't count towards rating. You do get a puzzle rating which is separate from your other ratings. There are also separate ratings for different time controls, bullet, blitz, rapid, daily. 

Ok, thank you.

play rated games against other people. 

I'm working through puzzles at present. Are the puzzles always correct with their solutions? I just played one where the answer was a check and diagonal take of a rook, but if I played my queen differently, I could get the opponent's queen?

there are like 50 trillion puzzles, you have to give the specific puzzle for things like that

So glad somebody else asked this, I have only just started playing... really struggling with all the terms etc...

FIDE rating? For that you need to play in a FIDE rated event and beat atleast 1 rated player with a performance over 1000 and also face minimum 5 players and you get your rating.

Ok, but how its the pointing system fpr ranking? I won playing with a friend an I bekomme a lower ranking after that

It looks like you played a single game in a shorter time control to all the others. This will be the one where your rating appeared to go down - as I said earlier, there are different ratings for different time controls.

Just as a general point for those just starting, you will see big swings in your rating in your first number of games - it takes a while for your rating to stabilise at an accurate level and the more games you play, the more accurate it becomes. 

I have yet to see a puzzle which is incorrect - it's likely that your move was good, but the solution was even better. The correct move is always the absolute best move. 

OP, I started playing a few weeks back and found that confusing as well. I started off working my way up the computers and currently stuck on the 1300 guy with the aggressive Queen moves. Anyway I finally got to nerve to play live game and as others mentioned I did Daily Chess and have 3 days to make 1 move. That's the max time you have and this current game we've had about 16 moves in 4 days. I have that arbitrary 1200 starting number which from my understanding will change after this games comes to completion. This was a good way to start since it gives you time to think carefully about your moves. Good luck and if you want to play your first game I'm open to play my second with you!