Here is a “minimal” guide to creating RPMs at http://steve-parker.org/rpm/ – I do plan to expand it further, but want to put something out there for now, for feedback at least, and to help people to make RPMs without necessarily having to dig deep into all the extra stuff that RPM can do for them.
I plan to make this into a more detailed and complete document, but for now, I’d love you to read this and tell me what you think.
*nix Shell 
Hey, nice step by step guide for beginners!
One thing it gets wrong (or maybe just simplifies too much) is file placement.
BUILD and BUILDROOT should both be treated as temporary directoris. What you should do is place your source code (shell script and config files) under SOURCES dir, right along the SPECS dir. Mark each file as a Source. Then, in %install, copy the files over to from %SOURCE1 (and other %SOURCE#) to %{buildroot}/usr/bin and %{buildroot}/etc/. Then you won’t have to worry about %clean and friends.
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, that is the ‘proper’ way; this is just a quick and easy way to avoid the whole scripted copying part. Not clean, but simple and practical