I will help you with SDL. It took me a while to get used to at first as well, making a bunch of little demos for myself.

Please note that I'm developing an open source game development framework from SDL. It's hosted on SF.net, and I will be happy to bits of my code, if you need any.

Take a look at PJPlib and it's CVS and see what I've done so far with JEDI-SDL.