[CentOS] Software RAID on CentOS 4

All this talk about SATA RAID in the past few days made me wonder... about 
possibly using software RAID, or at least trying it on my own workstations 
and eventually production servers, after I learn more about it.

So, I started googling for tutorials and manuals, and there are usually two 
kinds I can find:

1. very basic "what is software RAID", or
2. complete 400+ page books on the topic sold at Amazon.com

Nothing in between.  :-(   Does anyone know of a good resource where I could 
read up more on it, from properly setting up boot drives (and mirroring boot 
partitions to second drive in RAID-1 config), to setting up swap partition, 
to best practices, caveats, etc.  All these articles usually also lack any 
kind of disk/data recovery info, procedures for detecting and swapping 
failed drives, etc.

I'm mostly interested in simple RAID-1 for redundancy - just 2 drives per 
system, that's all.  Typically on my hardware RAID boxes I set up a /boot, 
swap and / partitions, and would like to do the same using software RAID - 
again, with the ability to have a fully working boot partition and complete 
filesystem in case the main drive fails.

Thanks for any pointers, whether online or off.  I'm not adverse to buying a 
400+ page book if it covers all this, but the books I came across so far had 
pretty bad reviews and lacked data recovery altogether, which would make 
them rather useless.

Chris