Many of the control sequences listed in shell references aren't a shell feature at all, and are instead handled by the tty driver, which controls terminal I/O; nevertheless, they are well worth learning if you plan to use the command line. You can type 'stty all' or 'stty -a' (depending on your system) to see your control-key settings. On average, they will look like this:

Control Key stty Name Description
^\ quit same as ^C, but more violent
^? erase erase the last character ("delete")
^C intr stop current command ("panic key")
^D eof signals the end of input on stdin ("end-of-file")
^H backspace
^R rprnt on bash, you start a 'reverse-i-search'
^S stop halt all output to the screen (but not the running process!)
^Q start resume all output to the screen
^U kill erase the whole command line
^W werase erase the previous word
^Z susp suspend the running process and returns control to the shell