Drum heads work by being stretched across the drum at a certain tension. This tension is what creates the pitch of the sound when the drum is struck. Snare heads are tuned a lot tighter than toms, and bass heads are tuned a lot looser.
To tune a drum, you need a drum key. You can pick these up at most music shops and they are often pretty cheap. The key is what tightens the tension rods into the drum lugs, thus tuning the drum.
Note; drum lugs are the pink things seen here:
To tune a drum, you should fit the head and tighten the rods finger-tight. Then, pick a rod and tighten it slightly. Instead of choosing the next rod clockwise or anti-clockwise, the next rod you tighten should be the one opposite to the one just done. Keep going around the drum in this fashion until you've found a pitch you think sounds good.
Then you need to check the pitch of each lug. To do this, you should gently hold the drum head in the middle with a finger (to kill the overall sound of the skin) and tap roughly an inch or two away from each lug with a drumstick. When each lug is at the same pitch you'll find your drum sounds a lot nicer. Do the same with the underside (for toms you should tune it to the same pitch, snares can differ) and you're all done.
When you tune your bass drum you should look for the lowest pitch you can get from the head. To do this, press down on the head quite hard, and tighten the rods until any wrinkles on the head disappear. Once you've done this you can release the head and go round tightening the rods again until you get an even sound.
To be honest, it's often difficult to understand how to tune properly from any written guide. I was totally lost until I found the following videos. If you follow them you can't go wrong.
I should add that with the bass drum, I tend to keep my resonant head tuned up pretty high in comparison to the batter. Mainly because John Bonham did this, and his drums sounded amazing.
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