Fun Fact: Hawk's tut is
very shitty in many places. He mentions some completely irrelevant things and totally forgets others which are necessary to proper compiling.
If you have a Student License at Autodesk, get 3dsMAX along with its tutorials and learn from them. The modelling parts are very useful and ease a newb into the modelling world. When it comes to texturing,
this article was
extremely helpful.
Other than that, you've to do the same thing as one would do with any other software: play around with it and see what happens. You'll learn what to do to achieve a desired effect, what to never do unless you want bad things to happen, and how the program works.
As for the weapons tutorial, I believe there was a guide on TF2M about importing view and worldmodels and how to make them replace weapons. I can't seem to find it now, but it's very helpful for what you want to do.