Both of them have blogs available for free. Skip back to early 2006, start reading. (I recommend 2006 as both routinely published on beginner-friendly topics back then, but their focus has become more refined since then. There are only so many ways you can say "Your title tag is really freaking important, and you should get links." By the way, your title tag is freaking important, and you should get links.)

SEOMoz has a quite decent beginner's guide as I recall.

I've got a couple dozen articles on my blog on the subject, but they're not arranged in any sort of coherent fashion, and most are not filed under the SEO category. I'll trade: if you want to grab all the relevant URLs and organize them by theme, I'll let you ask me anything you want to for an hour. (That may or may not be a good deal.)