Bought a sainsmart arduino and the tutorials suck. HELP!

[Ian.M]

No. The purpose of an Arduino is to enable the 'maker' community to use a few microcontrollers and peripherals without the 99% masses having to read and understand device datasheets or write low-level code that bit-bashes registers.   The fact that its a reasonably capable ATmega board and development platform of interest to more serious hobbyists wanting to get into Atmel AVR development on the cheap is almost entirely a pure bonus, though it was quite intentional as the Arduino community needs to recruit that 1% who shouldn't be forced away from any machine running Atmel Studio at gunpoint for the greater good (unlike the other 99%), to write libraries for new peripherals and package them for the unwashed masses.

In your case, simply put the same MCU chip as any 'flavor' of Arduino on your own board, break out the programming pins to the standard 6 pin AVR serial programming header and program it either with a commercially available Atmel AVR programmer (preferred) or with an Arduino running the ArduinoISP sketch to emulate an AVRISP programmer.

N.B. If you pull the ATmega328P from your Arduino and replace it with one bought from a distributor, the Arduino will no longer work!  ATmega chips do NOT come preprogrammed^* with a bootloader so you need to program an Arduino compatible one by ISP before use.

* Unless you pay a premium and get it from an Arduino specialist reseller that offers that service.