Well, I just bought the brand new "Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus" book by Andre' LaMothe and this is covered.

i have the same book, it only has stuff on 2d rotations, and there's no 3d in that whole book. i have to buy volume 2 now. wtf?

anyone know where i can read articles about 3d forward kinematics?

There are two 3D tutorials (general and Direct3D) on the CD, complete with source code. Admittedly, they don't go into the level of detail promised by the second volume, but there is a pretty decent 3D tutorial.