I wouldn't start with this cookbook, which seems to be a laundry list of all the extremely hairy things you can do with Org. Think of it as an outliner with simple tables and spreadsheets: starting a line with "*"s makes it an outline heading, and "| something | like | this |" is a row in a table. That's how I've used it for years, despite being aware that it can do all sorts of other semi-related stuff. Don't venture down the rabbit hole of complexity unless you want to.