Solid advice from the pro's above Perfecto. I learned more from UV mapping a simple cube than I did from 3 days of reading helpfiles hehe.

There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.

Jokes aside, I've found it really helpful to work with a saved panel layout. UV/Persp. Splits the screen in half so you can both see the model and the UV map at the same time. I made a custom UV shelf and dragged Planar mapping options box, cylindrical options, spherical mapping options, and lastly Automatic mapping option box to this shelf. This way you can test a multitude of things and get a very visual feedback of the things happening to the UV's. Channel box visible also helps.