ESC Programming

I purchased some Turnigy Plush 12amp ESC's for my quadcopter. I looked up some videos and read what documentation I could as for programming them with my transmitter. When I tried to follow said instructions, I ended up having me ESC catch fire. So here is what I tried, please tell me what to do differently so don't have to keep buying more (kind of on a tight budget :)

1. Plugged ESC into transmitter and connected it to the motor. (side question: the wires on my ESC are dark brown, red and yellow instead of black, red and white...which colors correspond to each other)
2. Turned on transmitter with throttle set to maximum
3. Plugged Battery into ESC (red to red and black to black)
no audible sounds heard....

Any help is better than no help at all, thanks :)

Thanks Fred.
Yes, I meant receiver...it's been a long week lol
It looks like there was a short because I didn't insulate the connectors properly, so I learned my lesson there.
But I still cannot get the ESC to enter programming mode. When I try to enter programming mode (throttle set to max and yaw gain set to 0), I get a series of beeps. Each series repeats for times, then a new series starts. Can you give me a step by step of what you did, like what to plug in where? Because I think I'm missing something obvious and I can't find a document/tutorial that works

Ok, thanks so much Fred