The WP Tutorials are great when you know what you are looking for.
If you just want to understand how WP works then set up a WAMP or LAMP environment on your local machine, download WP, install it, and then start looking at the code to see what is doing what. If you understand PHP and MySQL then this will be an easy way to learn.
I find it best to download some of the free templates and look at how they are created. This will give you allot insight into how to customize certain aspects of WP.
Once you formulate specific questions by looking at the code and playing with it you can use the tutorials to gain better understanding.
Hope this helps.