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someone has already written a tutorial about it.

Related: The Tutorial Section

Select a face from the brush, hold "alt" and right click on the surface you want to align. Move each align to the next face. When your texture is properly aligned see if a single brush face is big enough for one lightmap luxel.

(3D window/lightmap grid) If not select the facetexture open its properties and choose a smaller lightmap grid. (default is 16, use numbers value of 2 => 16/8/4/2/1 ) Go back in to normal shaded/textured view. Select the faces you want to smooth (hold "CTRL"). Then go back into lightmap grid and click smooth, then select a number for its smoothing group.

sounds to play ingame by passing through a trigger or after a certain event, don't make the common mistake of using env_soundscape. Use ambient_generic. You don't have to use just ambient noises, any .wavs work with it.

Related: Ambient Sound Tutorial

Keep in mind that 1 Hammer unit is 1 inch(2.5 cm) in terms to the size of the player, 72 inches (6 Feet) and in this case 128 units equals 8 feet which is the height of the average ceiling. Geometry is kept in the same scale (8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, etc) because textures look best on faces (walls) that are in the same ratio.

But also keep in mind that the scaling to the game world is not exactly accurate to our world. If you’re trying to recreate (for example; your house or office) exactly you may want to try multiplying 1 inch from the real world to 1.5 Hammer units. The difference in comparison isn’t much but the end result can look more realistic. Though again keep in mind that your texturing will go a little strange since the textures aren’t meant to be used this way.

The map_edit command in Source is a useful feature that if used correctly allows you to alter certain parts of your map from within the game itself.

An example of this is running the map and allowing all the prop_physics objects to settle and fall in to place and then writing these new positions back to Hammer so that processing time can be saved by not calculating the props' location everytime the map starts in future.

This article on the Developer Wiki goes through the process in full detai