I'm still working on that myself...modeling and texturing work together with the lighting, so there's a lot that goes into it.
Jeremy Birn's book, Digital Lighting and Rendering (on Amazon here) is the best overall lighting resource. Robert did some comparisons with his methods in A:M in the thread located here.
Rodger Reynolds (profile here) is someone whose posts on the forum have great information on mechanical modeling and lighting.
The Technical Reference has a lot of great information in it....download it here.
Yves Poissant has a lot of great lighting information in some of his postings (profile here)
Hope some of that helps.