It is not programming and, therefore, is not as difficult to learn. Most HTML is nested commands. Tables are useful for more things than you can imagine. I rarely do a page that is not made more attractive by the use of one or more tables. Those are tables which contain images, but tables are also used to attractively display information as on this page .
Tables are extremely versatile and worth taking the time to learn.
Your best source of learning how to do HTML is the Web itself. You can copy down how something is done and use it later for your own pages. A lot of info is covered here. They have the various commands listed and you click to get to a page with a good explanation of how to do it. This is a really great site if you're doing your own Web Pages.