Blog Design Solutions
I’m finding Blog Design Solutions useful in learning how to set up a blog with WordPress. It covers a number of other blog engines as well, and explains how to set up a local test environment in OS X or Windows for trying out your blog before you launch it on the world.
UNIX / Linux users can extrapolate from the OS X instructions to set up a test environment as well.
Blog engines covered:
Movable Type
Expression Engine
WordPress
Textpattern
There is also a chapter on writing your own blog engine.