Those posts by Martin Fjordvald are pretty interesting for those who want to start playing with nginx. They're a lot easier to read than anything I've seen out there yet, and still convey some pretty valuable information.

• The inheritance model in configuration
• Configuration primer

The most interesting parts are probably the specific behaviours of location and directives like rewrite or try_files. Knowing this much can really help you a lot when writing/debugging nginx config files.

For most of us that come from Apache, understanding how much different Nginx's internal workings are from Apache can actually help to put aside all your knowledge from the big A to be able to jump in the motor oil. That next blog post is a really interesting resource for just this:

• Differences between Apache and Nginx