Well even though I know most of Async source code and how does it work, but I still use async mostly. So don't worry about that, you don't need to know exactly how it works. But as of learning, well I suggest you to read these articles:
- http://book.mixu.net/node/ch7.html
- http://stella.laurenzo.org/2011/03/bulletproof-node-js-coding/
- http://howtonode.org/promises
- http://web.archive.org/web/20120111150910/http://nodebits.org/distilled-patterns?
- http://raynos.github.com/presentation/shower/controlflow.htm (from Raynos comment)
These are the best things that I've seen on the net explaining async control flow at without any abstractions.
