I guess I need an even simpler tutorial on git itself then. I've set up an account on Github on the premise it boasted how straight forward it was and my short research on it sealed the deal. When you get down to the nitty gritty, however, some of it looks very unintuitive.
Assuming you are already a git user, then github is very straight forward!
If you want to learn git, you don't need a fancy server on the interwabs. You can create a git repo on your local drive and learn to work with it there.
You also don't have to use github's client. I personally use TortoiseGit, plus the command line. I would definitely recommend learning git from the command line, as it really helps to understand how it all works. There's only half a dozen different commands you need day-to-day.
With CVS/SubVersion/etc, you "update" to fetch changes from the server into your repo, and you "commit" to send your changes back to the repo. When updating, you might get conflicts if you've also got local changes.
With Git, you "fetch" to fetch changes from the server, BUT, these changes aren't immediately applied, just downloaded and kept in the background.
When you want to apply those remote changes, you "rebase", which rewinds the log to the most recent common ancestor (the log entry that both your local version, and the servers version descend from), then it applies the server's changes, and then it re-applies your local changes (which might cause conflicts).
With Git, "commit" takes all your local changes and adds them to the log/history... but does not send them to the server. You can commit many times locally before you decide to send your changes back to the central repo.
When you're happy with your local commits, you can "push" to send them to the central server.
So - instead of "update" you perform "fetch & rebase", and instead of commit your perform "commit & push".
There's a lot more to it than that... but I found this to be the biggest thing to get used to -- that you've got a full history log locally, and you can perform loads of local changes to it!