> I'd suggest the free literature from the Mises institute if you want to understand banking.
Those guys have an Agenda with a capital A themselves. I'd suggest reading a broad variety of sources, including some (mostly, actually) mainstream ones. With economics, there is an unfortunate tendency for "free on the internet" to mean "extremist", which is quite different from all the free programming docs we are used to hoovering up. Imagine if the documentation to color forth were the only thing you could get for free on the internet...
BTW, this is one notable exception: