newbie taking over

[Danna Dowdy]

I have recently been tasked to take over a sample web-gis application 
that was built by a former colleague.  I have zero experience with 
post-gis and mapserver and was wondering if there were some good 
introductions out there that may be helpful to me.

postgresql 8.0.2
postgis 1.0.0
mapserver 4.4.2
chameleon 2.0

what I currently have is a postgresql database table that contains 4 
columns: north, south, east, west...
I have created a polygon geometry column using:
select AddGeometryColumn('collection', 'geom', 4326, 'POLYGON', 2 );

I populated the field using:
update collection set geom =  geomfromtext('POLYGON((' || 
public.collection.north::varchar || ' ' || 
public.collection.east::varchar ||
                     ',' || public.collection.north::varchar || ' ' || 
public.collection.west::varchar ||
                     ',' || public.collection.south::varchar || ' ' || 
public.collection.west::varchar ||
                     ',' || public.collection.south::varchar || ' ' || 
public.collection.east::varchar ||'))', 4326);
The idea is to have a map that would display bounding boxes for all 
collections in that area where you could further choose those 
collections to get the data associated with them from the database....

Any help would be greatly appreciated.....