I have done just that, you will want to set up scene nodes for rendering textured quads (sprites), the way I went about the actor side was creating a sprite render component that gave you the interface for loading up a sprite and interfacing with it's scene node.

Mat has it right on point. Just don't forget to turn off the depth buffer by creating a depth-stencil state.

Yeah, you are going to have to sort your sprites as well, the book describes it for 3D and it is exactly the same in 2D, draw opaque sprites front to back, and translucent/transparent sprites back to front.

You are also DEFINITELY going to want to batch your draw calls, my first attempt at sprite rendering was very slow, try to group your rendering together into categories, in the case of sprites, grouping them by texture will save alot of expensive texture switching by only binding the texture once, you can than use a vertex buffer to batch your vertices.

Wait you said you are using SDL...so yeah none of that partains to SDL, but instead of erasing that I'll leave it in case it is helpful.