Not really a tutorial that I know of. Its mostly trial and error. Just type in "SMF" in google (without the quotes of course) and that will give you the official Simple Machines Forum website. That has the main software used at this forum. That being the actual forum stuff itself. For support and questions on how to install and manage it just sign up on there forum and they will help you. BTW don't just jump right into it. first thing you need for a good forum is a good Host. Meaning the people who host your forum on the internet. Me and IMT use Hostgator (pretty cheap and good in my opinion). The best way to go is to pay for your host not just get one of the free ones. because paid hosts treat you better, give you more bandwidth, more forum space, and best of all better tech support.
But as a warning a forum can be pretty hard to manage at sometimes and when you get it up and running always make a backup of the entire forum atleast twice a month. That way if you decide to customize it and mess up you won't have to completely redo the whole thing.
Veterans Day