Motif will isolate you from a lot of the nit-picky stuff that you have to worry about in X windows. So in these tutorials, I'm going to start talking about purely Motif programs, as best I can. I will add one or two capabilities at a time until you can write fairly involved Motif programs. As we go along however, we'll need to drop down to Xt or Xlib, and when we do I'll explain why and how as best I can. This is the same general plan that Young follows in his book.
You would do yourself a favor to actually type the code presented. Actually typing the code will help you get used to the variable names, types, procedure calls, etc. Some of the naming conventions will seem extremely arbitrary or long-winded to you initially, but after you've typed a lot of Motif code things will begin to make sense in a convoluted sort of way.