Hi

I would look at the ODE wiki, especially the third, demura.net from the Basic ODE.

http://ode-wiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=HOWTO

However, have you thought about using Bullet instead of ODE? Three years ago, I was at the same point, I ended up with using Bullet as there was a larger, more active community than with ODE and it has more features. But ODE is a good start. I used it for some first prototypes. However, I ended up using PhysX, as I needed dynamic meshes, which Bullet doesn't (well, almost not) support.

Cheers