This is the infamous Spider Technique. This exercise is excellent for really warming up your fingers before getting into anything heavy. When you pick try to have minimal wrist movement and mostly just circling your index and thumb around the strings, this way your wrist won't get tired as quickly. Also it is always good to do some regular chromatics before getting into the trickier stuff. Ex.1 starts off in F and continues upward till you hit the D# on the B string, I did it regularly here (See Ex.2) so you go back up the same fretting position, between the first and the fourth fret, however it is good to switch frets and go all the way up the neck to the last highest fret on your guitar.
Good luck, have fun with it, don't get too frustrated and we'll get into more advanced stuff next time. :-)