3D Programming - Weekly : Skeletal Animation

Skeletal Animation #1
Tips on getting started with skeleton animation. Gives an example bone data structure, and describes how you might want to animate it. Finally gives the basics needed to use the skeleton to deform a mesh.

Skeletal Animation #2
Multiple vertex attachments with weighting vertices are the standard for skeleton animation nowadays. This article describes the implementation of this, as well as using morph targets to blend multiple mesh chunks.

Skeletal Animation #3
Here you can find the details of computing bone matices from joints. Also how to use world space target rotations, perhaps to add rag-doll to your skeleton.