Well, to do a custom quicktag, you follow the “template” example. I usually copy the “bold” one, then take out the “b”, and change the name to whatever I’m setting up. I’ve done extremely complex tables in a quicktag, and really the only thing that can get complicated is making sure there’s no whitespace anywhere in the main section.
There’s a pretty good tutorial here: http://tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/quicktags/
Podz doesn’t get into the complex stuff, but he does give an overview.