The first is to right-click a file and choose Make Alias from the contextual menu, or you can do the same by pressing the Command-L hot key with the file selected.
There are several approaches you can take for creating aliases in OS X. Being simply a folder of aliases makes the contents of this folder easy to manage. A benefit to this is that you can create a folder that contains aliases of all the common documents, remote folders, and other items you access, and then add this to your Dock as a stack that you can quickly expand to access these resources. In a sense aliases allow a similar function as the OS X Dock or the Finder sidebar, except they can be placed anywhere on the file system. Aliases in OS X are analogous to the Windows shortcuts, in which you create a small pointer file that references another location or file on disk, so you can quickly access that resource without continuously having to reveal it first.
