Amsterdam Plugins is, apart from the Server project, the core package of the Amsterdam XML integration suite. It contains all base implementations of common functionality needed to create Amsterdam Channels, such as protocol handlers for files, ftp, http, jms and axis, filter to do various things with xml and publishers to send the content somewhere.
Usage is documented in the javadoc.
Amsterdam Plugins is the core package, and contains implementations of modules used to setup Amsterdam channels, such as protocol handlers, strategies, filters and publishers. To get a feeling of how to use them Amsterdam Demo should be consulted, and so should the Javadoc be. There are also a lot of unit tests to look into.