This chapter has discussed some of the basic commands for iptables and the tables very briefly that can be used in netfilter. The commands makes it possible to do quite a lot of different operations on the netfilter package loaded inside kernel as you have seen.
The next chapter will discuss all the available matches in iptables and netfilter. This is a very heavy and long chapter, and I humbly suggest that you don't need to actually learn every single match available in any detail, except the ones that you are going to use. A good idea might be to get a brief understanding of what each match does, and then get a better grasp on them as you need them.