RPM help

Hi everyone, I'm looking for a good resource that will explain the concept of RPMs to me. So far I've used YAST to cary out all my RPM operations so I'm not actually very clued up on the technoology itself. I was also wondering if there was a guide out there that could explain best practice for using RPMs with SUSE. I've built xinelib and kaffeine from source, for example, and now YOU keeps telling me that I should update to a newly available, though lower version. I was thinking that using RPMs might have prevented this little annoyance. Thanks in advance.