Well...since you asked - and since you haven't already been flooded with responses - I'll take the liberty of sticking my oar in.
My first suggestion: wipe the term "tall ship" from your vocabulary. It doesn't really mean anything . The phrase apparently originated with the great poet, John Masefield, in his "Sea Fever." ("I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky/And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.") In the 1970s or thereabouts it got picked up by advertisers and marketers as a means of promoting the appearances of sailing vessels (mainly sail training ships) at festivals and other events (most notably the U.S. Bicentennial celebration in 1976). Serious modelers and enthusiasts don't use it.
Sailing ships ("period ships" is another widely accepted term) occupy only a tiny segment of the plastic model business. Compared to their counterparts in aircraft, armor, railroad, and warship modeling, the number of people who make a hobby of building plastic sailing ship kits is miniscule. The kits that do exist are generally sneered at (in many cases unjustly, in my opinion) by people who consider themselves "real" ship modelers. They build from scratch, or from wood kits.
Personally, I'm firmly of the opinion that (as I used to tell people in my days as a hobby shop clerk) in terms of scale fidelity most of the plastic sailing ship kits are junk, and most of the wood kits are worse. A whole industry has developed around wood kits produced (and sold at astronomical prices) by Italian and Spanish manufacturers, apparently aimed at a market consisting largely of interior decorators and other folks who have little interest in real ships and just want a finished product that looks pretty. In this forum it's become sort of customary to refer to such kits as HECEPOBs. (That's Hideously Expensive Continental European Plank-On-Bulkhead.) The most common offenders are Mamoli, Amati, Corel, Artisania Latina, and Sergal.
It should be noted that there are good wood kit manufacturers out there. My three nominees are Model Shipways, Bluejacket, and Calder/Jotika, a British firm that makes excellent, if extremely expensive, eighteenth-century British warship kits.
Because the plastic sailing ship community is so small, scarcely anything about it has been published. About the only book I can think of that deals specifically with the topic is an old one from Kalmbach titled The Basics of Ship Model Building. Most of it is devoted to twentieth-century warships, but a couple of chapters (twenty or thirty pages, maybe) do deal with sailing vessels. It's been out of print for a long time.
The best way to get acquainted with the basics of sailing ship modeling probably is to get hold of several books that talk about wood kits. The one I'd recommend most for starters is George Campbell's The Neophyte Shipmodeler's Jackstay. It was published back in the early sixties by Model Shipways, as a general handbook for the company's solid-hull wood kits. Many of the techniques described in it are irrelevant to plastic kits, but it also contains lots of good, general advice. And it provides a remarkably thorough, but brief, introduction to the history of sailing ship technology and terminology. If one learned everything about ships that's between the covers of that book, one would be well on the way to understanding how a sailing ship works - and understanding the real thing is the first step toward building a serious scale model of it.
Another book I can recommend, with a few reservations, is Historic Ship Models, by Wolfram zu Mondfelt. (I may have garbled that slightly; sorry.) Mr. Mondfelt knows his subject, and the book contains a ton of information. Its big problems, from the standpoint of the American newcomer, are that (a) it's extremely European in focus, and (b) it covers so much material that it can't cover any particular ship type, or even any one century in history, with any thoroughness. But it's certainly worth reading and keeping close to the workbench.
As many participants in this Forum know, I'm a big booster of the plastic sailing ship kit - with the huge caveat that the really good ones (in my personal opinion) number in the low dozens. I also have to acknowledge that, while styrene plastic is a fine medium for reproducing many parts of a sailing ship (the hull, decorative carvings, and many deck fittings), it's a lousy medium for reproducing others. Plastic is not good for smaller masts and yards, or for small parts that have to sustain a lot of stress (e.g., eyebolts and belaying pins). Some modelers replace a good percentage of the kit parts with scratchbuilt replacements, or with aftermarket parts designed for wood models.
This post is too long already, so I'll stop. I hope other Forum members will add their two cents' worth.