Cool!
I've made a website that's completely dedicated to GIMP tutorials called
http://How-to-GIMP.com You'll definitely find the 'public library' and 'free videos' sections of that site useful.
If you download GIMP, I recommend getting the newest version that's available (currently GIMP 2.8) as it's much easier to deal with than GIMP 2.6. You can download it for free here:
http://GIMP.org/downloads Please let me know if you have any questions at all! I'm happy to help if I can. And good luck!