This goes to show that Hugo is quite excellent, but it's docs are lacking. Learning it was one long fight, but after having understood the basic concepts and gained experience using it for several projects, I really came to appreciate this static site generator.
Hey, author here. Thanks so much for the kind words! I love Hugo, and I wanted to give people a real-world tour of how to build something concrete with it.
https://pragprog.com/titles/bhhugo/build-websites-with-hugo/