Chops

Tonight was my first attempt at pork chops. They came out tasty but I failed at cooking them. I like baking because if you follow the recipe exactly, it almost always works. But frying meat on the stove is the opposite. I do just what the recipe says and it's all wrong. For those of us that don't know how to cook, there is no way to know how high to put the heat or how long to cook the meat. People who cook just seem to magically know. This and the spattering oil that burns me are the most frustrating things about cooking and the main reasons why I have avoided frying things until now. See, I had the chops in the pan on medium heat like the recipe said and after the 5 minutes, they were already burned. I turned down the heat then and after 5 minutes on the other side I had no way to know if they were cooked through. LZ came and cut them all up then declared them too pink. They took a looong time after that but I was totally at a loss and he finished cooking them. Sad.

So: How do you know what heat to fry your meat on before they burn?
And: How can you tell if its cooked through without mangling the meat?