The way I teach myself how to use a given modeling toolkit is to write a tutorial about it; I then post this in the hopes that it will save someone else the trouble I went through to learn what I learned from scratch. I have posted only one of these- a tutorial on the original `Repast' toolkit, posted in 2003 and now obsolete but still useful, apparently (I continue to receive comments on it from time to time). Others are planned.
The RePast tutorial is posted in its entirety, as it originally appeared on my university account, here.