Well, it starts off very simple. If you want an image on the left side of the page with text floating around it on the right, use this:
Code:
[CSS]
div.leftpic {
float: left;
clear: left;
text-align: left;
}
[XHTML]
<div class="leftpic"><img ..... /></div>
<p>Your text here</p>
To have the image float to the right, just change 'left' to 'right' in the css.
It gets tricky when you want to fine-tune the margins, a lot of the extra code in Zelda's 'Three Men in a Boat' is written to do that.