The indispensible Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX2e
When I write an article in LaTeX, I always use the same skeleton. It's got a makefile for easy generation of bibliography, PDFs and a tarball: latex article skel.tar.gz.
To include a jpg or png in the resulting PDF which scales to the width of the text:
\resizebox{\columnwidth}{!}{\includegraphics{filename}}For more graphics tips: http://www.cs.usask.ca/~gutwin/gi/pdflatex.htm