While the Seam book is good you may find the Reference Documentation as helpful (a second source of info is always a good thing).

EntityBean : think of this as being a record from your database. You should start off by not putting any logic in it at all. It's just a container.

SessionBean : this is where you might have some logic, eg. reading a record from the database into an EntityBean.

JSF Page : the page that you present to the User. You can refer to your Session bean with the notation #{mySessionBeanName.someProperty}

AutoCreate just tells Seam to create an instance of the Bean automatically. Rather than having to use @In(create=true) you can just use @In. If you are getting null pointers then you'll need either @AutoCreate or @In(create=true)

I really would suggest using Seam-Gen to create your first project. If you follow the standards from that you'll see how EntityBeans get created (they don't have @Name - although there's non reason why not).

You got error messages when you tried to use newcontact because the name of the variable used with @In should match exactly the name you provide with @Name (unless you use @In(value="#{contact}") Contact newContact;

Give Seam-gen a go and then let us know how you get on.

Cheers,

Damian

The JBoss Tools for Eclipse have a great wizard for creating new projects, too.

If you are new to MVC and IOC-frameworks, reading through a book at one sitting might be a little like trying to drink from a fire hose. Play around with code. Then re-read the manual. Test theories in code. Re-read the manual.

There is a nice article series on IBM developerWorks Java section, too.