The biggest obstacle I had to overcome to learn general relativity was the meani

ng of the word geometry . Renteln s book makes it clear what the meaning of the word
is, whereas other books leave it undefined and somewhat mystical! We have the ma
thematical object of a differentiable manifold, and it is imbued with a topology
and a metric.
The topology tells you that if two points in spacetime are close to each other i
f ?t2+?x2+?y2+?z2
is small. This is the notion of closeness used to define differentiation and the p
hrase locally co-moving reference frame .
The metric tells you to be concerned with the quantity ?t2-?x2-?y2-?z2
. This is what tells you how particles move when not acted upon by an outside fo
rce (they move in geodesics), it tells you how curved spacetime is (it gives you
the Ricci curvature tensor), and it tells you what the symmetries of spacetime
are (this in turn gives you relativistic momentum, relativistic angular momentum
, and all your other conservation laws).
The reason I m telling you all of this: I struggled for a long time to grasp tenso
rs because no one had made this distinction for me before. Once I found Renteln s
book it all clicked into place.
Regarding Emad s answer, I studied through Schaum s Vector Analysis and found it gre
at - until the last chapter on tensors. It really helped my understanding of thr
ee-dimensional vector calculus for use in electrodynamics. I also own Schaum s Ten
sor calculus and never could understand the point of anything in it! Consider th
e following definition: a tensor is a list of numbers whose components vary like
Ti jk l=Ta bc d?yi?xa??yj?xb?xc?xk??yd?xl
under a change in basis .
If that definition seems nice and cuddly and understandable to you, then by all
means learn from those two Schaum s books. I personally can t stand them and could n
ever learn tensor calculus from them, despite wasting ~forty or so hours trying.