For very nice tutorials for someone completely new to EC2 and server-side admin stuff in general, check out Paul Stamatiou's tutorials. here is one of them: http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-getting-started-with-amazon-...

For those that are familiar with the command line and remote servers, but new to EC2, Flurdy's tutorials are pretty solid

http://flurdy.com/docs/ec2/

Besides that if you plan on making any public AMIs, the blog posts by Eric Hammond of Alestic are required reading and his example github repo for this task should be checked out.