Along the journey to get a good enough understanding of UV mapping, I’ve also installed Blender, a free and open source 3D creation suite, and followed a few tutorials to get a grasp of the basics of the software itself and especially to understand how to create UV maps.
It’s been a bit of a pain in the a** because Blender is not the simplest software to learn, there’s an almost infinite amount of people on the web eager to tell you it has a steep learning curve and indeed it has.
Youtube was of great help in the process, there are many tutorials available to learn how to use this frightening piece of software and in the end learning only what is needed to create UV maps is not that tough.