LinuxQuestions.org - Why are all IPTables guides out-dated? Can this be done..?

I've plugged a laptop into eth1, and a cable going from eth0 to the switch...

I haven't used IPTables before, and I'm trying to test out masquerading, but any 'example' firewall scripts don't work...or maybe I just can't do what I'm trying?

For the beginning, all I want to do is get the laptop to ping my machine, and vice versa, or even not vice versa for security (when i connect to the net, we don't want peeps being able to ping my internal network..)...so the laptop would be considered the net atm, and i want to ping it from my machine...but any firewall scripts don't do it, and the couple of things I've tried hasn't worked...

Anybody got any UP-TO-DATE guides/suggestions? Can this be done temporarily with masquerading, just so i can test some iptables stuff before i chuck my ADSL modem on there, or do I have to go straight to it with the modem?...

I've done a search on here, gotten a few links, but some are just too damn advanced (I've never user IPTables..), or the others are just damn useless...I can't work out how to bridge the two network cards, and have the filtering inbetween them...is this what masquerading esentially is?

I'm tryin to get this box up asap so I can swap to linux full time on my machine (I don't wanna installed Roaring Penguin on my machine...)...

Thanks for any suggestions :)

Also: I don't need to modprobe any ip_tables modules etc, because I've just gone into the Networking section in the kernel compilation and selected absolutely everything, lol