I'm looking for some good reading on terrain texturing. Especially when it comes to repeating textures on coarse/irregular terrain. I feel I too often end up with inefficiently textured pieces of landscape. Maybe there's some game's level editor that could give some insight on how to handle this well? Thanks

Honestly, for modeling... I'd just stick to your 3d modeling program, for sake of formats. As for books... I don't know any for artist but there are plenty of terrain programming related videos for programmers. As for outside tools, you really might want to take a look at L3DT and maybe Terragen. I use L3DT and it works pretty nice if you look at their tutorials. Your best option as for education is to look for internet tutorials on Google for tutorials. Hope that is of some help!