A) Yes, private keys work. I use them all the time for my own accounts. They're actually more secure than passwords, as they can't be guessed... provided, of course, that no one actually steals data from your personal PC. Basically, you have to have some program generate the key pair. Most of them will make a ".key" file and a ".pub" file. The .pub is the public key, the one that goes on the server. The other one is private and should NEVER go to anyone but you. Basically you have to copy the public key to the server... it goes the in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file. One key per line. If you've only got one (which is the norm) you can just copy the .pub file to that location. (Meaning it would be renamed "authorized_keys" and placed in the .ssh directory inside your home directory.
B) Tutorial? Awesome... PDF? WTF? Why would you make something so useful into a format so kludgy? HTML works just fine! :-)