Hey, I am also a GIMP newbie.
If you follow this
link in The GIMP's website, they have some books you can search for. Two of these books (if you follow their links), "Grokking the GIMP" and "Gimp - The Official Handbook," have web versions of their books that you can browse and read for free.
Also, The GIMP just released its new version 2.0 recently so those books might be slightly out-of-date. However, I think they are definitely good enough for you to get a good grip on the tool.
They also have the
GIMP Users Group where you can check out some tutorials on a few cool effects.
Hope that helps.... Hey, I am learning The GIMP too.