Illustrator assistance for book layout

A non-fiction book?

You mean, you will need a table of contents, tables, an index, page numbers, lists going through several paragraphs and all of that?

As Bobby already wrote: you do not want to do it in Illustrator, because all of that does not exist in Illustrator.

If you're going to lay out a book I'd recommend doing that using InDesign rather than Illustrator. InDesign has more features for multi-page, long document layouts. Various graphical items can be created in Illustrator and then placed into an InDesign document. The same goes for photos or other pixel-based elements created in Photoshop.

As for how-to links, just search this forum on various topics. A number of participants here, including community experts, regularly post tutorial videos online (often at YouTube).