Fantastic job.  I have had problems due to reverse dns and other things that networksolutions doesn't support in it's hosted DNS... so I've had to setup my own DNS server.  I had already completed everything on my own before finding this, but I realize now that much of what I had setup was redundant and just wrong.  It still worked, but this has me down to just 4 files in my zone records and I have more stuff setup now for SPF and the tip mentioned here for "allow-recursion" within the options section of named.conf (though I had to do research to figure out how to list my ip block since I'm on what I now know to be a "moat" type setup and I only want the ip's on that network to contact me for dns lookup.

 Another tip I cam across... add the following to the options section in named.conf:

version "Nunyabeeswax";

Replace "Nunyabeeswax" with whatever you want.  This helps fight some hacking by hiding the version number of BIND... though it's probably mainly useful for those that refuse to upgrade old name servers.

 Again, excellent writeup.  I wanted to learn more and after digging through plenty of other articles, this was the most complete and understandable.

Other notes:

/var/named/ - default location in Slackware for Zone files

everything after ; in a zone file is a comment so be descriptive.