Well, since the dust of the drama has been settled *coughs Devuan *coughs we all know systemd will be the way to go in Linux. Even the OS’s that have been using Upstart will replace Upstart with systemd soon. If you want to get a quick hold of the basics then the Fedora Magazine has great series of articles that will give you a fundamental understanding of systemd.

I have pdf’d the series here (don’t hit the print button blindly, the comments of the articles are also included in the pdf. Yeah I know )

1_systemd_initialization
2_systemd_unit_file_basics
3_systemd_converting_sysvinit_scripts
4_systemd_using_the_journal
5_systemd_masking_units
6_systemd_dependencies
7_systemd_template_units