timers in games...

so the only games I've written so far were all turn-based games.

I'm now going to try my hand at a real time game.  Nothing fancy, probably nothing fun either, just something to expand my know-how a little bit.  I've so far written an .md2 loader/viewer that animates the various animations of a model, but the animations are freakishly fast, more than they're supposed to be, due to the computer's speed

how do I go about starting off a game's main loop like this such that an uber-fast CPU doesn't cause everything to happen in the blink of an eye?  And what about making it somewhat tolerable to run on an underpowered computer without it bogging down the system (Quake 1 on my old old old 486 computer was playable in this regard... it seemed "real time aware" even if it was a slideshow, so an ogre would run the same speed in the world regardless of the graphics' framerate). 

I also probably want to not just make it smooth on a fast CPU but also throttled -- sure, it CAN render 300 frames per second, but I want to be able to cap that to 60fps as a maximum.

are there any reliable books I should look for that go into decent enough detail this subject?

Each time you update, use a function like gettimeofday() to determine the interval that has passed since the last update.  Use this interval when updating.