My favorite first places where I got the explanations of this stuff are:Primer & the Crash Course.
My favorite examples of various page-layouts are the Netscape people home pages, and note Hagan Heller's useful personal HTML Guide.
For an overview of what's out there and available, check out the Yahoo Index and the W3 Summary. The W3 stuff includes a link to Tim Berners-Lee's most-excellent Style Guide.
I'll add more to this later.
After you've gotten started writing in HTML, I personally found that Graham's Sourcebook gave me a more-solid grounding.