The brain works in strange ways. If you give me a movie reference I can usually not only give you the name of the movie, but also the director, several actors and possibly a few other members of the crew along with some other movies they worked on. It seems that your brain will store just about anything you throw at it, but it only retrieves the stuff you find really interesting.
Buzzwords work the same way.
Actually, it's not particularly complex. I will now refrain from any more of these awful puns. Anyway, this tutorial will also stay away from specific implementation issues since the implementation of skeletal animation probably varies from program to program. A skeletal animation system is based around bones. These are basically what 3D Studio would call 'helpers'.