I just bought a great book about matte painting which I would recommend to anyone on this forum wishing to learn. It's called 'The Digital Matte Painting Handbook' by David Mattingly (its on amazon etc). Mattingly was head of matte painting at Disney and worked on movies like Tron, the Black Hole etc. As well as all the stuff you'd expect about painting, the book goes into a lot of detail about setting up camera projections in Maya.
I just got David Mattingly's book as well and there is a TON of great material in there. Besides the book the enclosed dvd has prject files (PSD, AE, MAYA) and training videos. Really great resource.