Survival analysis got easier than ever since the time Therneau wrote the Survival package for S-plus/R. There have been several extensions of this package. The package is easy to access as there are several whole book written on it (Modeling Survival Data: Extending the Cox Model or try Survival Analysis Using S: Analysis of Time-To-Event Data by by Mara Tableman, Jong Sung Kim).

There are several free tutorials available on the web: such as this simple tutorial and here and also check out the technical reports in here.

If someone is interested in learning survival analysis by example, one such example could be found on my website.