If you choose a farm installation, you get much more control. When you do a farm installation, it will create the Central Admin site (and you do get to choose what port for the Central Admin site). Unlike the simple install, the farm installation doesn't automatically create a default content site. You must create it as a seperate step and at that time you can choose your port. Hope that helps.
If you're into books, I picked this one up ("Beginning Sharepoint 2007 Administration" ISBN: 978-0-470-12529-8) and it provides a good general overview of how Sharepoint works, the basics of how to set it up, it compares and contrasts WSS 3.0 vs. MOSS 2007, and gives an overview of Sharepoint Designer. It's a small book and really doesn't go too far in depth, but that's why I got it so I could quickly get an overview and an idea of how to install and begin customizing.