Honestly nothing like trial and error works best after checking out some of Jimer Lins stuff.
You'll learn the annoying nuances, the cool tricks and fun of SFM, so play with whatever you can in the engine.
Basically work in keyframes in the graph editor to save pain. work from pose to pose. It took me a lot of headaches to be able to be happy with the animations. You'll need to familiarise yourself with it, and be sure to save lots so you can test stuff!