no, it's not too difficult. First of all, i suggest you use the new blender 2.46 release because they fixed two important bugs about targeting textures for baking.

To bake textures, lights, etc, you need:

- Textures to receive the baking (correctly applied to the meshes via any of the unwrap options)

- Textures or materials IN your meshes, so they will be baked (if you want textures)

- of course, lights.

I suggest to start with simple cubes and objects to understand the process.