In Spain this summer, I gave a talk about new features in debhelper. It seemed to help a lot of people get started. So if you were not at DebConf, this is your chance to learn about dh, overrides, addons, and mimimal rules files.

(low quality | higher quality)

The audio gets much better half-way through, and slides become visible. (We all also wake up a bit midway through -- it had been a late night!) The full slides are here.