Animation is as easy as splitting the image into an array. Figure how to split the image and put each part into the same array and Animating is as easy as...
Image[15];
i++;
if (i > 14)
i = 0;
Draw Image[i];
BOOM animated. Don't really need a tutorial on animation. Just need to know how to load the image properly. This is just sudo code
EDIT: Not sure if SDL has an easier way of doing it, I know Allegro does but that is irrelevant unless you use Allegro and SDL. As you can use both at the same time.
Animation should be timed with the game loop. If he has nothing slowing down the loop then this will run at different speeds on various machines. But yea it's the basics of it and would give him what he wants for now and good leaning experience. You will want proper timing in your game eventually.
@OP see theres no point in skipping steps to end up with a program that is half functional. If you already know some of the steps then that means you skip tho's tutorials and you do the one's that you don't already know. Programming takes time and patience so if you don't have the patience to do simple tutorials then programming might not be for you. And by the way lazy foo does have animation tutorial witch you could run without doing any other tutorial.
Another thing is you never mentioned what version of SDL you are using, there is 1 official release of SDL 1.2 and the one still in progress SDL 2.0 but stable enough and yes there are differences in them both. SDL 2.0 has a better rendering system then 1.2 and some of the calls are different. So lazyfoo is in 1.2 so if you are running 2.0 a few things will need to be changed.
If you really need a full game example SDL creator also offer source of the game maelstorm found here http://www.libsdl.org/projects/Maelstrom/source.html
I might as well note this also, I'm not sure what skill level your C++ if that's what you are using, but your game should be well object oriented, meaning you will need to know how to properly uses multiple classes and properly structure your game. For example in my game I might have a class that builds a space ship but is bases on my drawing class witch will load the images and draw to the screen. So then anything drawing to the screen will be based of it. So you want animation you will have another class handling your animation and doing the proper loading for your sprite sheet. Obviously people don't use the exact same procedure in setting there class's but the idea is the same. And this is just one of many things that is useful, other things are good to know is link list, vector, deque, virtual functions, pure virtual functions, base class, friends class... and the list goes on.
If your goal is too succeed in this then I would suggest to put a bit more effort and possibly try to make a more simple game at first. If you think it's a waste of time then tell that to the other thousands of programmers who all started with baby steps. First semester at the college we made text base apps in C/C++, then we moves to allegro with is a 2D library then we did SDL. So still in 2D doing some of the same things as before but with a different library. Was it a waste of time? No because I learnt a lot out of it and another thing it teaches you is to adapt to new code/library's.