One thing you should NOT do is jump up and bottle the beer the second the airlock stops bubbling. Fermentation can still be occurring with little or no airlock activity. Stable gravity readings or waiting three weeks (for normal gravity ales) are a better bet.
I read on here something like "your hydrometer is a scientifically calibrated tool; your airlock is a cheap piece of plastic". I took this to heart and waited till a couple of days after it had stopped bubbling then checked the gravity on two seperate occasions. The readings were the same and were close to the gravity suggested by the recipe.
I surmised that the primary fermentation had finished, but I didn't bottle it there and then. I left it for a few more days for the secondary fermentation. I think it was about 8 days. I didn't write it down. Then I bottled because It was into the third week and I wanted to be comfortably far away from John Palmer's "three weeks on the yeast cake and autolysis sets in". I didn't want autolysis, which has been variously described as the smell of burning rubber and as the smell of syphilitic chimp sh*t. (by the way, how to you pronounce this? AU-to-LIE-sis or au-TOH-li-SIS?)
I would like to have left it a while longer. I'm not really in a hurry to drink my beer. I'd rather it was nice. I doubt this'll happen, but I would like to impress my friends with my first brew.
Wandering around this and other fora, I find people who leave their beer in the primary for ages before bottling and some who have it in primary a week before bottling.
My guess is that it's to do with the style of beer. I'm brewing British pub bitter, my next will be a mild. I've read that they're traditionally drunk young. My idea of a high alcohol beer is 5% which is pretty much the lowest alcohol beer you can get in the LCBO.
On this forum people like great big beers - imperials, trappists and big bocks and apfelwine, which I'd never heard of before joining this community. Those beasts need longer to get their act together, I think.
Thanks for the advice, jmiracle. It makes me more confident in my practice.