Does reading the rom area (using lda or any other type of addressing mode) read open bus ($80-$FF)? If it does, is there anyway to read rom areas to see what byte is there (like if I have 960 nametable bytes somewhere)? Or do I instead have to have a lda, and sta whenever I want to store something into an register. Like if I had music would I need an
lda #$ce
sta $4000
etc...
or could I have the byte $ce sstored somewhere in rom and I could read it?

Look up the various addressing modes.

____________________
My English is better than your Geberquen.

You can read from the rom area.

It wouldn't make sense if you couldn't. o_O

- Drag

Open bus is an area of memory that isn't mapped anywhere, so all the chips in the system would ignore it. Reading it would simply return the last value that was on the bus (which would normally be some or all of the bits from last byte of the instruction that was just ran). $4018-$7FFF is where the open bus is.

But yeah, some of my first programs were mostly LDA #something / STA somewhere. That works for some stuff, but it's a lot more fun when you learn all the addressing modes, especially the indirect ones like:
loop:
lda (addr_lo),y
sta $2007
iny
bne loop
inc addr_lo+1