My recommendation for learning class-based views is to use a good editor or IDE that allows you to drill down into the library code easily. In PyCharm/IntelliJ I can just command-click on the TemplateView symbol and see its implementation, and do so recursively until I've unraveled the entire thing.
Agreed. Django's documentation is pretty light on the order in which certain functions will be executed and diving into the code is the only way I've been able to understand what happens when handling forms and views.