You didn't finish your post. You left off the part about how you read the manual and then you were fine.
As I said, I followed several of the shapes and paths tutorials. That still didn't make the tool intuitive. I've just found this [1] "crash course" that might have just the right level of detail; it would be great if something like that was linked from Inkscape's help menu with a neon-flashing "start here!" button.